Hugo Schwyzer

It feels like the first full day of summer. It’s hot, and soon I’ll be hitting the trails of the Arroyo for a morning run. I’ve switched sunscreens — I’m trying to get rid of all the parabens in my grooming products, and am trying to make sure everything I put on my body is vegan, never tested on animals, and without suspected carcinogens. So far, I really like Alba Botanica.

No doubt you’ve seen the story about the statistical probability that first-born sons will turn out a wee bit smarter than their younger siblings. Though I don’t consider myself feeble-minded, I can say with absolute certainty that this did not prove to be the case in my family.

Both my younger brother and I were tested in the mid-1970s with the old Stanford-Binet IQ test. I did very well, but my brother was off the charts, quite a few points above me. I was twelve when, pilfering my mother’s desk, I found the two papers with our relative results — it was a memorable but hardly crushing moment in my youth. (I was an incorrigible snoop from about age 8 to 13). Luckily (because sometimes it seems to be more attributable to grace or luck than to virtue), I’ve never been jealous of my brother’s first-rate mind, or of his accomplishments. I will note that he and my two younger sisters followed me to Berkeley; each sibling had a higher GPA than his or her predecessor. The Schwyzer family defies the results of this little study.

It was a blessing to grow up with parents who made each of their children feel special, unique, talented, bright, and loved. We all ended up at the same university, but we never - I can say this with certainty - felt competitive with one another. On this, the first anniversary of my father’s death, I am grateful for many things, not least for his unconditional acceptance of the paths his two sons and two daughters chose. He loved us radically equally, and we knew it, and our closeness today is in many ways a consequence of that.