Dear friends, most of you know about my brother Hakeem - (he's the older one, i'm the prettier one). But you don't know about my brother Dave. Dave was born a year after Hakeem and year before me - when my parents brought me home, I met both my brothers at the same time.

Dave's parents owned the home we all grew up in - 185 Rogers avenue in Brooklyn, a three story, multi-family house in the heart of Crown Heights. For the first 7 or so years of my life, Dave lived on the ground floor, Hakeem & I on the third floor. We played together night & day.

Then Dave and his parents moved to Englewood Cliffs, NJ; a world away as far as we were concerned. But we stayed in touch, alternating calling each other on weekends, when it was cheaper to talk, but even then we could only talk for 30 minutes before we had to hangup.

But Dave's mom, Beulah Blaine, Aunt Bea to us, made sure "her boys" still spent time together. We never missed a birthday together. And during school breaks and summers, she'd drive back to Brooklyn to pick Hakeem and I up so we could spend weekends and weeks in Jersey.

Those were glorious days. We'd play video and role playing games inside the house (yep, that's how three Black boys from Brooklyn got down in the early 80s) and run around and ride bikes outside on their expansive, wooded corner lot.