Two Halves. Wholly.

Hey, it's Sunday Morning,

In the very early years, before the separation, on Friday evenings Papi would walk my brother and me to the corner store and buy a single yellow pencil and a notebook. A carpenter by trade, he had no use for the school sharpener. Instead, he'd pull out his chisel and cut the pencil clean in half—one half for me, one for my brother.

But there was never any fairness in halves. One side had the eraser, the other side didn't. We switched every week.

He did the same with our notebooks. Those black-and-white marble ones with the blue lines. Split down the middle, the binding barely holding, half a book for each of us.

This was pre-school—before preschool was even a thing. Someone in the neighborhood opened a "school" in her backyard and taught us how to read and write before we headed to the 'big boys' school.

Being a year younger than my brother, learning was harder. My notebook looked like it belonged to baby Pollock; scribbles and crossed-out mistakes everywhere. And God only knows how much I could've used the eraser.

But Robert had it that week.

And here's what I remember most: he never made me feel like I was losing. On his eraser weeks, he'd sit next to me at that backyard school and hold my hand, guiding it across the page, teaching me how to form the letters. His eraser, his advantage. But he used his turn to help me through mine.

That's when I learned something Papi was teaching us with that chisel: sharing is more than waiting to take your turn. It's rooting for the other person during their turn.

The week Robert had the eraser, I got to watch him succeed. And the week I had it, he celebrated my clean pages like they were his own. We both understood that pencil belonged to both of us, no matter who held which half.

To this day, I can still smell the paper, the wood, and the graphite, sharp as memory. I can still hear the scrape of the carpenter's chisel, the pencil shavings curling onto the table like little yellow ribbons. I can still see us gathered around Papi resting in the mahogany rocking chair, feet up, white t-shirt, whistling-happy face as we watched him, with delight and horror, masterfully sharpen our pencils. One of us holding the eraser. Both of us winning.

Because that's the thing about love: when you share it, someone else's good fortune becomes yours too. Their turn is your turn. Their win is yours too.

We learned it with trophies and with pencils. We practice it still. Wholly.

And you, who taught you how to share the win?