Juan Carlos, king of Spain, killed his younger brother in a gun accident as a child. The brother was the only other male in the line of succession. This might explain why the king held a reception in 1986 for the veterans of the International Brigades. These foreigners had fought and mostly died to save the Spanish Republic from the monarchists, among others, in Spain's fratricidal Civil War of 50 years before.

I shot my brother Dave in the calf with a BB gun at a range of about 150 yards at our grandfather's farm as he was walking away uphill. He was 6 years old. I didn't think I could hit him from that distance, but I did: the BB bounced off without having done any damage, but his feelings were hurt permanently.

This little brother of mine now works for the Washington Post and was awarded a Pulitzer Prize last year for his reporting on Bill Clinton.

After the Pulitzer award was announced, the woman who runs the art museum at the college where I teach asked: "Doesn't that make you feel inadequate?"

I didn't think at the time that this was a normal, let alone polite, question for her to ask, but I have worked out an answer to it: Everything makes me feel inadequate, and it does the same to him.

Dave had a tough time because our sister Jean and I were always doing great in school. Dave wouldn't eat most foods, talked back to Dad, and was our mother's favorite, so we thought. We still do. None of us could understand why she'd make this mistake, and we attributed it to his asthmatic condition.

People say that the strongest bond is the sibling bond. I know exactly what my brother's motives are in everything. In fact, my brother and I are one.

One day in 1962 I had gotten halfway home from West and saw Dave running toward me, running hard. "What's wrong?" I asked him when he reached me. He was out of breath.

"The letter came today!" he said. "From Harvard! You got in!" It took me back a little to see what this meant to him. What was it to him?

Maybe he's forgotten, but I'll never forget what it was to be intercepted by my little brother at the corner of the street as he carried the news of my success.