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A Journey With You

Tag Archives: siblings

To Older Siblings Everywhere

17 Wednesday Oct 2018

Posted by A Journey With You in heroes, relationships, Uncategorized

≈ 8 Comments

Tags

birthday, brother, brothers, childhood, elementary school, family, growing up, memories, parents, school, sibling, siblings, the wonder years, tribute

Do you ever think about your childhood and what your life was like then? I am decades away from living in the pink house, across the street from an elementary school, where I spent seven of my childhood years (from age 3 to 10).

I think about that time, with a chicken coop out back full of hens and a rooster or two; the garden that provided us with almost all of our vegetables and enough cucumbers, green beans, cauliflower, and carrots for many dinners and pickling. There were the apple trees, plum tree, and apricot trees, and a patch of strawberries and rhubarb. I’ll never forget picking tomatoes out of the garden and biting into them as the juice made a path across my dirt covered face.

It isn’t the fresh food I remember most, though or the smell of lilacs that wafted through the yard in spring. What I remember most is life with my three older brothers. I remember the times I was allowed to play with them or tag along with them, and the times I was told, no and was left behind.

Today, my oldest brother, Joel, turns sixty and it is his birthday that has me wandering back to the house where we all lived together under one roof. A house where the walls and floors and paint and furniture held our laughter, our secrets, our dreams, and our tears. At times blood tied us together, and at times life, anger and choices tore us apart.

My brother Joel had a pet mouse, a pet rat, pet snakes, played baseball as a catcher, and kept more than a dozen Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups in the freezer and instructed his younger siblings not to touch that chocolate.

I looked up to my oldest brother, and I listened to him. Listening to Joel was a problem, though because he liked to tell stories. Stories weren’t for lying, although he occasionally received a spanking for that, his stories were made up to entertain himself and anyone else who would listen. I was always a willing audience.

Joel once sent me to school with a bottle of mouthwash (I didn’t know what it was) and told me to drink it for superpowers like running faster or jump roping longer. He told me it was “White Lightning,” a magic potion. You can imagine how well my bottle of white lightning went over with my teachers in elementary school.

At school for show-and-tell, we were instructed to bring things from home that started with the letter, B. Joel went through our whole house and collected everything from baseballs, books, batteries, brushes, etc. and sent me to school with bags full of things that started with a B. I brought at least ten times the number of items of any other kid.

Another time for show-and-tell, Joel sent me to school with a record by Shel Silverstein. He wanted me to share the song, “Sarah, Cynthia, Silvia Stout.” It is a song about a girl who will not take the garbage out. The song is very funny, and my class loved it and wanted to hear the other songs on the record. Well, some of the other songs, contain adult language and themes and once again, I upset the elementary school teachers.

Having older siblings almost ensures that you will know things teachers don’t think are age appropriate. That means getting in trouble for being “ahead of the class” in things like anatomy and sex.

When our time in the pink house came to an end, and my parents went different ways, my brother Joel stepped in and took care of all of us in ways he was too young to do. At night before bed, he would drive my brother, Andrew, and I out to the neighboring town so we could see our mom at her waitressing job and she could kiss us before he took us home and put us to bed.

There are a thousand other memories; feelings, images, familiar smells, favorite foods, least favorite foods that bring back the time we shared under one roof. Good times and bad times. Happy times and hard times. But in the end, there is nothing quite like having an older brother.

Time Machine

13 Sunday Sep 2015

Posted by A Journey With You in writing

≈ 8 Comments

Tags

American Embassy, Cairo, childhood, family, home, past, pictures, railroad, siblings, travel, writing

This is what my life looked like in 1966. Here I am with my three biological brothers, laughing. I had a big laugh, deep, and from the belly.

During this time, my dad worked on the railroad. In fact, he worked on the railroad from the time he was seventeen or eighteen until he retired some time in his sixties. When this picture was taken my mom didn’t work outside of the home, but in a few short years, she would work as a waitress, as a dispatcher at a police station, at a radio station, much later (when I was in high school) she worked at the American Embassy in Cairo. My mom had many jobs, and lived in many cities across the world, but my dad stayed with one job and still lives in the town I grew up in.

There is something comforting about visiting my dad’s house because time is so slow there, and there have been no big changes over the past fifty years.  I can walk by our old houses. I can walk by my old schools. My best friend from grade school still lives there, and we get together every time I go “home.”

Visitors

06 Sunday Sep 2015

Posted by A Journey With You in relationships, writing

≈ 10 Comments

Tags

baseball, brother, childhood, creative nonfiction, family, god, guests, heroes, hope, inspiration, magic, siblings, writing

My oldest brother is visiting. He is seven years older than I am. I can remember when I was a little girl, and my parents were separated, my brother would pack me and my other brother up and take us out to a neighboring town where our mom was waitressing, so we could see her before bed.  While we were visiting my mom, we would fold napkins for the tables, and when we left she would give us After Eight Mints which I thought were the fanciest chocolate in the world. My oldest brother would take us home and help us get to bed.

Today we are all going to a baseball game. Baseball has been a big part of my brother’s life. I remember going to watch him play when he was in high school. In grade school, like most young children who are exposed to both fantasy and religion, I believed a combination of the two, and I used to try to use “magic” prayers when it was my brother’s turn to bat in order to help him do well. I would sit there and hum, or recite the same word over again and again, with the full belief that I was changing the course of the game.

I loved my oldest brother, and I thought almost everything he did was “right” and “cool.” I am sure he is the first person in this world that I looked up to. I can remember that he used to keep Reeses Peanut Butter Cups in the freezer and tell us not to touch them. Even though I would open that freezer drawer and stare at that candy longingly, I never took one from his stash. I also remember that he had a pet mouse that he took with him to a baseball game one day and someone accidently killed it. My brother came home in tears. It was one of those times when I wished I knew the right thing to say or do, but I was still pretty young without a lot of emotional resources or experience.

When I was still in grade school, my brother made me a concoction of mouth wash and I’m not sure what else, and told me it was “White Lightening” and that it would give me super powers. I took the potion to school, and would drink it on the playground and then run as fast as I could. The teachers questioned me about it, and took it away from me. They may have even called my parents, I’m not sure. All I knew was that my brother had given me a bottle of super powers, and I was going to use it.

Today as I watch the pitcher warm up his arm, and the first batter step onto home plate, I will be thinking about the young boy who was one of my first caregivers and heroes – a boy who had a lot of responsibility placed on him at a very young age, and never took out the pressure on his younger siblings. I’ll be thinking about him swinging a bat and I might say a few “magic” prayers that this time he wins at something bigger than baseball. I want him to win in love and in life.

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