The Good, The Bad And The Cute As A Bug's Ear

As a child I was particularly close to my sister Linda. She was sixteen when I was born. I think she was one of the people most excited to hear that Mom was expecting a baby. It is Linda's handwriting that recorded the details in my baby book. She was the one who would try to get me not to hate having my hair washed. I loved walking around in her high-heels. I remember her carrying me all around the house on her shoulders singing:

In the land of Mars,
where the ladies smoke cigars,
every puff they take, is enough to kill a snake.
When the snake is dead, they put roses in their head.
When the roses die, they put diamonds in their eyes.
When the diamonds break it is nineteen forty-eight.

(It has sort of a snake-charmer tune...)

One of my very earliest memories dates back to an outing with Linda and her boyfriend Jim to Rockefeller Plaza to see the Christmas tree. I was two years old, I think. I recall sitting up on Jim's shoulders and looking over the crowd. (To the right is a more recent incarnation of the famous tree from one of Scott's and my fabulous December in New York trips.)

There is also a dim recollection of them taking me to ride a pony (at a circus, maybe) and me having nothing to do with the smelly beast.

Linda married Jim when I was five years old. There are two photos from that day which I remember....one I'm glad is not in my possession, and one I wish was. The first is a picture of me in my navy blue velvet dress with the big white collar with a daisy on the left side. In that photo my bangs are so short it looks as if I'd narrowly survived an attack by the dreaded scissors of doom! (Honestly, Mom...after five years of cutting my hair, hadn't you learned that it shrinks up when it dries!) The second picture is one of me dancing with Dad, with my feet on his shoes.That photo is a treasure, and someday I'm going to have it for my own!

I think Jim always liked me too. They treated me nicely and let me hang with them. They were experts at making me feel special.

I remember spending a night at their apartment. I was a bit conflicted by the presence of their pet spider monkey. Creepy little thing! They got a puppy while they still lived in the apartment and somehow convinced my parents to keep him at our house until they moved into the house they'd bought. Dad didn't want us to get attached to him, because he was only going to stay a little while, so we didn't. Poor Tinker stayed chained up in the back yard and never got to become a real member of the family like a pet should. Seven years later, Tinker was still living - temporarily - at our house. When we moved to Colorado we returned Tinkler to Linda, and he got hit and killed by a car shortly thereafter.

Speaking of their house...Coolest house ever! Well, at least to me as a kid... It was over a hundred years old and defined the word "character." It needed a lot of renovation, which, for some reason Jim - a schoolteacher - thought he was capable of. I don't think much fixing up ever happened. This house was amazing, though... It had a foyer with an enormous stone fireplace. The stairs ran up the side of the foyer, then split at a landing. To the right, stairs wound down to the kitchen, and the left staircase led up to the bedrooms. Even the attic was cool! When I would read romance novels as a teenager about the heroine being taken to her lover's family estate, I would envision it looking like this house! Today when I remember it, I think it would have made a perfectly charming Bed and Breakfast.

Jim was into photography as a hobby at that time. I remember him having his own darkroom in their house where he developed his own photos. Here is the precious find from my Adventures in Clutterland. I remember vividly when Jim took this photo of me in our front yard. I even remember the sleeveless red bandana print shirt I was wearing. I look like a little Snickelfritz, don't I? Kind of artsy, though, huh? I am fully convinced it is the last good photo ever taken of me.



At the time, the significance of it was lost on me, but they even included me in a very important gathering for the first listening of The Beatles' Abbey Road. I remember being invited upstairs into what we called the "dormitory" - the huge room my dad had built for my five older sisters to share. I can still remember sitting on the cold green tile floor at the foot the bed that was Judy's when she still lived at home. Watching the expressions of my sister, her husband and my brother as they savored every note is a musical moment that taught me more than anything could about the power of music.

Another musical memory from this time was a song called The Unicorn Song by Irish Rovers. Jim played that A LOT. Here are the lyrics I remember to this day:

Green alligators and long-necked geese
Some humpty backed camels and some chimpanzees
Some cats and rats and elephants, but sure as you're born
Don't you forget
My unicorns

I probably don't need to mention this now, as it is no doubt perfectly evident, but Jim was VERY Irish and VERY proud of that fact. I am surprised that he had anything to do with Linda, as the amount of Irish blood in our family lineage is minuscule. Maybe Linda's red hair and freckles were enough...

When I was about eight years old they took me aside when they had come to Sunday dinner. They told me they wanted me to be the first to know that Linda was pregnant. I felt like the most important person in the world that day! Imagine...me being the first to know anything!

Another Sunday Jim brought his fifth grade class's spelling tests to correct. Frustrated that his students had done so poorly, he quizzed me - a second-grader - on the words, and I performed so well that he proclaimed I was smarter than his fifth graders! Well stroke my ego!

Sometimes our interaction was a little more adventuresome... One day Jim sped into our driveway as I was playing nearby. He jumped out of the car yelling, "I dropped my cigarette in the back seat...help me find it!" I ran over to the car and dove in, rummaging through the back seat which was littered with school papers for a smoldering butt! As I process that event with my adult brain, it strikes me as wrong on so many levels...

Then there was the time when he got a motorcycle and rode it over to show the family. I went out to see what all the commotion was about. Just as I was about to catch a glimpse, I heard my mother's voice from the front door, "Don't you let that child near that thing!" Gee, Mom, I didn't know you cared!

I loved my role as aunt to their two beautiful children, Brendan and Nancy. Although I'd been an aunt to my sister Betty's first three children by then, my relationship with these children seemed different. Even after their own children were born, Linda and Jim still treated me as if I were special. I would spend the night and help take care of the kids. Linda taught me how to blow a bubble with bubblegum, took me shopping with her and let me help with projects around their house.

OK, here is the part where the story gets ugly.

When Brendan was three and Nancy was one, Linda and Jim started having marital problems. Of course as a little sister I wasn't privy to the details. Linda once told me something little Brendan told her about Daddy and another lady at her apartment... (Shiver...)

One night Linda came home from her typesetting job to find Jim and the children GONE. Moved out. Without a trace.

It turns out he had kidnapped them and taken them to live with relatives in Ireland. My sister was granted custody in this country, but since they were with their father, there was nothing Ireland could do to compel him to bring them back to the U.S. Linda lived without her own children for over a decade. She would occasionally go to visit them, but her children grew up hardly knowing their own mother. (To the right is a photo of Nancy and Brendan on one of Linda's visits. Oh god...Nancy just had a baby of her own last year!)

Eventually Jim got sick and needed medical care in the U.S., so he did come back with the children. Finally she has been reunited with her children. I don't know how she retained her sanity through it all.

This has been an evocative jaunt down memory lane for me. It's puzzling how something that starts out with such warm remembrances can turn so cold. That's life for you! I'm left basking in an overwhelming sense of amazement...

I'm amazed by how many details a picture sparked.

I'm amazed by how influential early relationships prove to be.

I'm amazed at how much we can't know about another person's heart.

I'm amazed by how people survive life's twists and turns.

I'm amazed by how much people can change.