One interesting and persistent theme of our adult relationship that has been amplified by your writings (and the the way in which RF seems to nurture a particular kind of reflective personal narrative, perhaps), has been the slow revelation of the complex and often fraught origins of the interests and idiosyncracies which, as your younger brother, seemed to me not only as just-so manifestations of your character (Michael, not Jonathan) but as minor but important revelations that, along with baseball cards and Hawaiian shorts and model rockets and Depeche Mode, described for me what the world was, how it worked, and where I fit in it.

That is to say, I never really bothered to get as deeply into the D&D world as you, and your AD&D manuals were as about discernable to me as the phone book or the Torah (which were about equally ubiquitous and (not) interesting to me as a child) were. I never really understood what all of the dice were for, and I specifically remember trying to reconcile talk of Jonathan's 'plane' of existence with the only concept of a 'plane' that I had available to me at the time, and thus being introduced to the new confusion of homonymny. But because you were around and because I looked up to you and coveted your attention, the basic D&D character that you helped me develop and DM'd for me (Arthur, I believe, from the animated feature The Sword in the Stone) was formative for me nevertheless. I loved playing that game and others that you initiated, precisely because of the ways they brought rich and carefully constructed fantasy universes into close proximity with my daily experience without requiring me to do any work.