FALLING FAR FROM THE TREE
My sister’s heavenly birthday was Monday. That has me thinking about her more than usual. And “usual” is a bunch. She would be turning 60 this year. Her worldly self would not have liked me mentioning that at all, but I think her heavenly self wouldn’t mind. I like to think some of our more shallow qualities won’t matter quite so much in the afterlife.
Kathy and I had a difficult time living under the same roof. We didn’t really start getting along until I was a freshman in high school and she was a freshman in college. From that point forward we were the best of friends.
Once time she came home from Sam Houston State and took me to one of my first concerts at the Frank Erwin Center in Austin. We called it The Drum in those days. Linda Ronstadt if I remember correctly. I remember feeling very grown up with just the two of us in the car.
Kathy got into poetry and art in a big way in college. She made me a book of her favorite poems and drew pictures on some of them. It was a special Christmas or birthday gift, and I still have it… somewhere… because I’m one of those sentimental people who can’t throw anything away. And I now have a storage space at the corner of Hwy 77 and FM 908 to prove it.
When I graduated high school mom and dad took Kathy and me to Cancun for several days. We spent most of our time at the swim up bar where they did not take money. You had to charge it to your room, or maybe your parent’s room. My memory is fuzzy from all the rum y cocas served in a coconut shell. That was 37 years ago and to this day I cannot drink or even smell rum.
Kathy had the first baby out of all us kids. What an exciting time that was. It seemed like she was pregnant for far longer than nine months. At the time she lived out in the country. Her husband was gone a lot working so one of us would stay with her when he was gone. There’s this thing that pregnant woman are susceptible to but I forget the name. But because of it for most of her pregnancy she had to either lie in bed or lie on the couch. I remember it was NBA playoff season and she knew every player on every team because all she could do was watch TV and they didn’t have many channels.
One of the scariest moments of my life was when we were on the couch watching basketball and talking. All of the sudden the baby decided to change positions. Her stomach lurched from one side to the other. I screamed like a banshee. I thought the baby was coming right then. I had never seen anything like that in my life. She couldn’t stop laughing at me.
When it was Kevin’s turn to stay, she’d make him drive her real fast up and down the dirt road she lived on with those washboard-looking bumps trying to make that baby come. And that evidently worked because he was the one who ended up taking her to the hospital when it was time. Scared out of his wits. She used to love telling that story on him. She could barely get it out because she was laughing so much.
And there’s the laughter again. And again. And again. I miss talking to her. She is the only person who I talked to every single day in some form. Either phone calls, emails, texts. That’s the hardest thing for me to get used to. I still want to ask her things or tell her things that I know would make her laugh.
I like to imagine the other angels being very entertained by her.
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