When I was five, we moved to Bethesda, Maryland. Our stuff was delayed for about a week so we moved into an empty three-story house with hard wood floors and old green radiators that would burn your skin raw if you sat on them. Some friends loaned us a few toys to keep my sister, brother and me occupied. There were three plastic action figures - an Indian, a knight, and General Custer with a shiny blue uniform and bright yellow hair. I don't know why, but I recall one moment in particular. The three of us sat in a circle on the floor of our new living room, while Susan chanted as we each held one of the dolls and had them dance a jig to Susan’s sing-song voice.
It was a moment of simple joy. We didn’t have our stuff, but we had each other. Once the moving trucks arrived and as school started up, we were back in our own worlds again, several years apart. I was in Kindergarten, Jeff in third grade and Susan in sixth. We were well timed.
Did we get along as siblings? We did, after a fashion, but we were each very different. Susan was the creative and musical one, later finding her own path away from our conservative upbringing. Jeff was athletic and competitive, extroverted with a great capacity for many friendships. I was the nerdy one who would rather spend an afternoon alone playing with my toy soldiers or reading Tintin. We were all influenced by Mom's strong personality, something I am not sure I was fully aware of until my fifties.
Of course, what tends to come to mind first are the times when we did not get along so well. One evening, Susan was babysitting me, just the two of us at home. As soon as we were alone in the house, she began to stare at me, walking towards me slowly with her arms outstretched. When I yelled, "Susan, stop it!," she slowly replied, "I'm not Susan. I'm just borrowing Susan's body," and kept walking towards me. I ran, crying, into other parts of the house, but instead of chasing me, Susan just kept walking after me slowly, step by step.
There was another time I was so angry at Jeff about something that I made a plan. I gathered crackers and other snacks and put them in our guest bathroom, the one with the very '70s black and white wallpaper. Then I placed a gallon of milk in the tub and ran a couple inches of water to keep it cold. After my preparation, I found Jeff in the basement where he was hanging out with one of his friends. With no warning, I socked him right in the jaw, then ran upstairs as fast I could, careening into the bathroom and locking the door behind me. I then waited it out until Mom and Dad came home. I withstood the siege, but the thing is, I can't recall for the life of me why I did this. I was an angry little kid sometimes.
Jeff would get me back later. He was not a bully nor particularly mean to me. When we lived in California for a year in 1978, we grew closer because neither he nor I had many friends. We used to play all sorts of invented sports games in our weirdly sculpted yard with the lava rock gardens and small curving patches of grass.
But after Susan left for college, we traveled back to California for a two-week vacation. Jeff was in his mid-teenage years and no boy that age is especially reasonable. We had borrowed Uncle Dan's car to drive up into the Redwood region. Jeff and I were stuck in the back seat with a cooler between us. There was not a lot of space. We had a rule that we each had to stay on our half of the car with an imaginary line drawn down the middle of the cooler as enforcement. So what did Jeff do? All trip long, he pulled my arm over the line, then claimed I was violating his space and punished me by punching me in the shoulder over and over. That was a long trip.
Still, it must not have done any permanent damage because two decades later when Jeff kindly asked me speak at his installation service as a pastor in Asheville, I told that story to great effect - and with affection.
There was another trip we took, this time to Cooperstown, NY with our folks. Jeff brought along his best friend, George. Together, they teased me endlessly. When no one else was watching, George would often get in my face and stare at me with a sickly malevolent grin. When I shouted at him to stop and told my parents, George always denied it and I was told to relax and stop imagining things. But, as they say, what comes around goes around.
We were staying on the second floor of a Holiday Inn right above the lobby and bar. Patrons in various states of inebriation left by twos and threes late into the night. We were supposed to be in bed but George and Jeff thought it would be great fun to disturb the peace. Whenever they heard customers leaving the bar, they crawled out of bed in their underwear and hammered loudly on the window, then ducked down so they would not get caught.
I quietly got out of bed and made my way over to our room door and waited. The next time George and Jeff hammered on the windows, I immediately switched on the lights, illuminating them against the night sky. They froze, mid-hammer, silhouetted against the window in their tightie whities, too stunned to even duck down. It only lasted for a few seconds, but it was a perfect moment in time, absolutely sublime. I can still see it today.
Did I get along with my siblings growing up? If these are the worst stories I have to tell, the answer must be: yes. We had our own interests and personalities. We were each different. But we were family.
When Dad got suddenly ill and passed away in 2020, we had to come together quickly to love and support him and Mom as best we could. We were still those different kids, and all three of us brought different gifts and energies to the crisis. I was in a great deal of discomfort from Lyme and gall bladder disease, which, truth be told, was not a lot of fun for them either. But somehow, we got through it. We sat on that cold, hard floor together and danced a jig.
Thank you for making me think about, and feel that strange sense of differentness and togetherness between me and my siblings, which metamorphosed several times over the years, beginning with our military brat beginnings and now approaching our 7th decades of coming and going and doing.
Loved this