Funny story: I was talking to my 62-year-old brother, Kerry, just last week and he told me that he had gotten married in January.

It was on a Sunday, he said, and he knew I wouldn't play golf that day. He didn't see any point in making the call.

I had called him on an unrelated matter, actually to gather information for last week's column. It's not the first time I've enlisted his help on a story, but we hadn't talked for about seven months.

He just slipped the minor detail about his change in marital status into the conversation.

Oh, and had I heard from our older brother, James, who lives in Maine? Seems he's planning a visit to the area this summer for the first time in several years, and maybe we ought to see about getting together.

Good thing I called, or Jim would probably have come to Thanksgiving Point as well, but would have also forgotten to call.

OK, so my brothers and I aren't that close. Kerry is five years older than I am, and James is seven.

When I came along, the last apple on the family tree, my mother thought I was a Blessed Event. This view was not popular with my brothers.

James, who had a fairly independent life by the time I was old enough to notice, didn't pay much attention to me one way or another, unless I was being particularly obnoxious, which, to hear them tell it, happened a lot.

As we got older, we drifted further apart. I was still in elementary school when James moved to Seattle to go to college. Kerry was in college the year before I entered high school.

And both of them left pretty big shoes to fill. James played a mean tenor saxophone, acted in school plays, was editor of the school newspaper and had some of the highest test scores at our small high school.

Kerry was president of the senior class, quarterback of the high school football team and one of the best basketball players in town.

I was uncoordinated and could barely dribble a basketball. I weighed 121 pounds and was slow, so I barely made an impression on the football team.

Despite private lessons, I never mastered the sax, and the high school newspaper didn't interest me. I was cast as a lead for the school play my senior year, but the play was cancelled before rehearsals got started.

As far as my brothers were concerned, I was a failure. In fact, the only good thing Kerry did for me was to tell me that my aspirations to run the mile for the high school would never be fulfilled because I didn't have the necessary will power.

I ran the mile for three years and captained the school's first cross country team when I was a senior -- my only athletic achievement. And I did it all just to prove he was wrong.

Over the years we have been busy with our own lives. When our parents died within six months of each other about 26 years ago, we just kept on drifting.

We've gotten together maybe three times in the interim. I've spent a night or two at Kerry's house and Sharon and I went to visit James in Maine a few years ago.

The last time we all got together in American Fork, I remember James's wife laughing out loud to hear her husband, a retired naval captain, referred to as Jimmy. No one she knew ever called him that. And when he comes out this summer, he'll still be Jimmy to me.

I love my brothers. But a couple of hours every two or three years is enough to keep up, as a rule.

Except in the event of life-changing activities. Then it's time to pick up the phone and renew family acquaintances. And I told Kerry that he'd better make a call the next time he gets married.