I Am An Only Child...

and today is my sister's birthday. The daughter of my father's sister and just a hair of a year older than I, Sis is the closest set of female hormones I will ever have to a sibling, and that works for me. When still chubby with baby fat and wearing cats-eye, prescription glasses in neon colors, we tap-danced our way to fame in Beverly Ann's production of The Wizard of Oz - we were bluebirds, we were, dressed in itchy blue sequined body hugging tutus. Over the years we were decked out in pink feathers and purple fringe and bright yellow and turquoise satin with mexican sombreros. Sis and her family lived upstairs from our grandparents in a large multi-family whose stairs I so fondly remember rolling down, ass over tea kettle, ever so gracefully, in response to my father's beckoning whistle signaling that it was time to roll on home...I still take everything literally. Every Saturday Dad and I climbed into one of our many oversized Buicks with the leather interior and headed out to visit the family in that big, old, green house with the awesome front porch. Aunts, Uncles and cousins, fifteen in all, arrived in various groupings to sit in Nana and Grampie's smoke filled kitchen and catch up. Coffee was always brewed and polanta and pastry were abundant.

Eventually, puberty brought us all to the loading docks behind the bowling alley to hang out with Sis' friends in the hood, but back then we didn't call it the hood because that would have been an appendage of an article of clothing and that would have been silly, but not as silly as wearing our jeans with the crotch seam down around our knees - chyeah, the bell bottoms would have ripped. One evening, while hanging at the proverbial loading dock, one of Sis' friends introduced me to little green and pink men dancing on the hood of his car, but since chemically induced hallucinations neither lift nor separate and therefore serve no valid purpose in the grand scheme of things, I'll move on...

Twenty-five years ago Sis married an honest, hard-working guy, from right off the boat, who has proven to me that she is the luckiest woman in the world and after years of tears and trying, they've produced three of the coolest sprouts whom I adore. She cooks and cleans and works really hard taking care of sick people; she smokes - too much - but she doesn't drink and she can throw down a mean game of Texas Hold'em right in the middle of her husband and four brothers-in-law all conversing in Italian at a decibel level strong enough to cause bits and pieces of the ceiling to lightly dust the over-sized kitchen table that used to be in her dining room until her husband decided that they needed, without delay in time for the Super Bowl, a wrap around couch the size of a cruise ship and a large screen t.v. within which I can sleep along with a twin size mattress and a box spring and a small Volkswagon.

She believes in her family - at all costs - and our once a month get togethers aren't nearly enough. Her blood is my blood. And Sis, my blood is still one year younger than yours!