In our family he was known as the "strange one." Two years older than me and a bookworm, my brother was always one jump ahead of me academically and physically. The apple of my parents’ eye, it was always a challenge to keep up with him. Sometimes though, he gave you the creeps. For instance, whenever we drove past cemeteries, he would stop in mid-sentence and his gaze would float over the landscape of grave markers and flowers as he entered a quiet state from which only a pinch or punch in the arm would awaken him.

But I worshipped him like only a kid brother could. And we had something else in common. One time when we were 12 and 10, we were outside hitting baseballs when he suddenly dropped his bat and ran for his bike.

"Follow me!" he yelled over his shoulder and was out of sight before I could get my wits about me. Half an hour later he returned, dropped his bike and strode over to me to administer a cuff to my head.

"Bakatare!" he scolded. "Where were you?"

"What for?" I said, rubbing my head.

And then he told me what he had seen. It was round and HUGE and silvery. And quiet. It had floated slowly like a balloon directly over us and disappeared into the trees. That’s when he jumped on his bike to chase it.

"I swear to God, if was a damn UFO!" he insisted.

Our mother then shot out of the house upon hearing a swear word pop out of his mouth. That ended the conversation but not the ribbing. My uncles would tease him mercilessly.

"Dat ting wen fly over Honolulu an nobody nevah see? Haw, haw, haw."

I would have backed him up but, hey, I was just his stupid kid brother.

AT THAT TIME we lived across the street from a big Hawaiian guy and his wife. Junior was a person whom we both admired and feared. For one thing, he had a loud booming voice, and he rode motorcycles and worked on cars for a living. Because of his rough clientele, our parents forbade us from going over there to play.

The exception was Halloween night when he turned his garage into a haunted house, set up a barbecue and invited the neighborhood kids over for hot dogs and candy.

One evening we came home from baseball practice and found an ambulance and fire truck in front of his house. We ran home to our mother for an explanation but she told us to mind our own business. A few minutes later, the EMTs brought out a gurney and on it sheathed in white was a body. We were horrified. A real dead body! Obviously, someone had died but we didn’t know who. After dinner we couldn’t help but discuss the possibilities. We concluded that it was probably Junior’s wife. She was what you call a good-sized gal.

Past midnight, awake to take a pee, I noticed my brother wasn’t in his bed. Searching through the house, I found him at the front window. He motioned to me to keep quiet and pointed out the window. In the moonlight, I could see Junior outside his front door. He was crying. He kept wiping his eyes and although we couldn’t hear him, we could see his great shoulders shake with sobbing. A few moments later, he walked slowly down the street into the darkness. It was awful.

"Let’s go back to bed," said my brother, and within a minute he was fast asleep. I had a harder time dealing with the fact that someone we knew had just died.

The next morning our mother went over to pay her respects and got the story. Junior had come in for dinner after working on his bike, plopped in front of the TV and fell asleep. His wife, busy in the kitchen, hadn’t noticed that the snoring had stopped, and when he didn’t come to eat, she found he had died.

My mind was whirling — if she wasn’t the one who had died, who or what did my brother and I see last night? I raced to confront him.

"Didn’t we see him walking around last night?" I demanded.

"So, you saw him too?"

"Shouldn’t we tell Ma?"

He shook his head. "What for? They never believe you," he said.

So, all these years I’ve remained silent about what we saw that night.