Whoa. It feels like it’s been 87-thousand years since I last posted anything. I used to “need” this blog. Guess that’s no longer the case, but tonight I do.
My sister Karol (for those of you playing the home game), my middle sister, recently lost her husband due to massive heart attack. The proverbial cardiac widow maker, so she’s been staying with me, going on three weeks now and it’s quite been good. I hate that it comes at the expense of losing her husband, but I have to admit, having ‘a roommate’, for the first time in roughly 25-years, ain’t so bad.
I lived with chronic isolation during those years. Why? Because I could. To live alone in determined solitude for decades takes stern stuff. I’m not blowing my own horn, as they say, but some people can’t do it. Our father had a terminal case of codependency. His need for constant human contact, at the risk of not sounding ‘woke’ (which really, is the least of my concerns) made him effeminate in my eyes. He’ll be gone a year this May. It feels much longer. We had little contact with him in the past eight years. His call.
Anyway, living alone is a first for my sister. She’s handling it very well, all things considered, but her being here has created so many eye opening scenarios for me.
Here’s why: we last lived together as sisters when she graduated from High School, 51 years ago. Back then, there were no multiple chins, we could wear anything and eat anything and gray wasn’t the predominate color in our life’s palette.
Karol reminds me of one the happiest times in my life. I once thought this period was made unforgettable because I was clinically insane over my very first boyfriend, the king of my AM radio world. I was an inexplicably worldly 12 year old and a seventh grader; he was a 13-year-old eighth grader, just grasping the marvels of body hair.
But it wasn’t because of him at all. Instead, it was because my sister was a part of the memory bouquet that existed before our family imploded due to one of the most acrimonious divorces ever.
It was Hollywood bad.
But my sister reminds me of how life could be good, when we as a family were good. She married not long after High School and I was hell bent trying my best to turn out to be anything like our mother. That to me, meant a physical separation from my tattered family. I felt (right or wrong) this was a necessity ant the time. Karol got married, had four children and as a good wife and mother, was completely able to be anything remotely like our mom.
Her impending situation also reminds me that living alone is okay, but not the way I was doing it. I was rapidly becoming anti-social but my sister’s horrific situation, is sadly, helping me break that cycle.
* She’s neat, tidy and disinfects. I own five HazMat suits.
* She’s demure understands boundaries. What’s a boundary??? That’s the name of a famous paper towel, right?
* She is an exceptional cook. I’m paralyzed being near an oven.
She’s welcomed to stay as long as she wants; I want her to consider her side of my home as her pied-à-terre as as long as she can continue to tolerate my arthritic body, that I screech when attempting to move, that I have a very odd schedule, that neatness isn’t a priority, my memory is shit and yes, I talk to myself, this is her home. What’s worse is that I often ask questions out loud….then answer them!!! I’m enduring all the degrading blights of middle age that despite her being roughly four years older, my sister has yet to experience.
She now has no idea WHO I’m talking to and won’t even respond. She thinks I’m crazy…a product of my own solemnity. I suppose I am, so in self defense, I’m forced to accuse her of being deaf.
So that could mean not much has changed between us, really. I used to call her “monkey face” and she named me “bulldog face”. I once thought it was because as a kid, I could do a decent impersonation of then President Lyndon Johnson. But recently, I saw a pic of myself from 59 years ago. Calling me “Bulldog Face” was actually a compliment. I wasn’t the cutest by-product of genetic co-mingling.
But that’s okay.
I’m crazy, she can’t hear yet, we’re co-existing perfectly here at my house, now full of vox humana. I’d forgotten how much I appreciate the sound.
I’d forgotten how much I missed it.
I’d forgotten how much I’ve missed my sister.
