………………….I was still in high school when this picture was taken so it must have been 1965 0r 1966……..My brother Mauro, the oldest of three boys, is 7 years older than me. He’s 6’3″ to my 5’10″…. He had recently come back from his tour in the service when the photo was taken. He was stationed in Berlin, Germany during the cold war, and the Berlin Wall, while the Vietnam War was building up at the other end of the planet….My Mom in the middle was our rock…..I know for certain I would not have become the person I am today without her….She supported, and ENCOURAGED everything I ever did!…I thought the world of my brother when I was very young, but as we got older we had very little in common, and the age gap seemed to widen us. We weren’t very close…..It was when I got older, and started to work, and he married and had a family that our lives started to converge again. I loved his wife Kathy and I adored his blond, blue eyed children!………Today we are very close….We are all the family we have left. I depend on him for all the questions I have no answers to, and he always comes through for me. I speak to him almost every day…..even ask him when the next Yankee game is on….He put the “YES” app on my phone so I could find out for myself, but I still would rather call him and ask him…..Thank God for facetime!…..He’s very smart in ways that I never was. He was always great with math, and I had to go to summer school! He’s a tech and loves gadgets, and can fix almost everything!!!. To me it’s all a great mystery…but….he has always said to me….”you can push a pencil around a piece of paper like no other”………We are really two different sides of a coin, but we are brothers, and we love each other, and in the end that’s all that matters.