On siblings, neck strangles, and advantages

"That was nice, Baby Girl," I said after I saw her putting her brother into an affectionate neck strangle. "I gave [Little Man] a hug and told him he did a good job," she said.

It wasn't that she knew he did a good job; she spent the entirety of the T-ball game sifting through the nearby stream for minnows.

It wasn't that this was our routine after games: hugs and attaboys.

I think it was that she knew he needed it. Siblings can sense these unspoken needs in a way that is hard to qualify or quantify but which seems as true and clear as a car emerging from the car wash. Perhaps that is what siblings are: people who have come through the same wash cycle, people who've been scrubbed by the same soap, buffed by the same brushes, people who entered and exited from the same places. And sometimes they're not even biological.

My friend Haddy says she loves "to see siblings becoming." I think this is perfectly put. After just a week at home with my kids on summer vacation, I love to see them becoming so much more than the girl and boy who were knit together in the same pouch. Their identities as singular punks are evolving just as surely as the identity they share as a sibling set: they are whole people and they are part of a whole greater than themselves. They share a horizontal relationship that will be recognized with confirmations, like, "Ah, of course, you are his sister," and, at times, with incredulity "Oh! He's your brother?!"  that I'm sure will follow them well into their adulthood.

I am grateful to have witnessed their early moments of gelling and the inevitable moments where they beat the tar out of one another. I am overcome sometimes how two people who didn't get to choose one another for five years continue to choose one another: as playmates, as best frenemies.  I think about the disadvantages they have, living so many hundreds of miles removed from any family. How they don't know many of their grands and aunties and uncles and cousins in anything more than monochrome, in one dimension.

But then I think about the great, immeasurable advantage of just having a sibling with whom to suffer these really weird parents. Even if they have nothing in common, have disparate life goals, have no abiding interest in pursuing a meaningful relationship with one another--siblings have the goods on one another. They understand how each other came to be, far better than their parents could ever fathom. They will know the ticking of each other's hearts, not just the steady rhythmic beats but the wild, erratic hiccups and dips and the soul-thirst for a hug after a T-ball game, where upon a little brother, aka "Little Bother" asked the snack provider for an extra juicebox. "For my sister."

The most amazing folk concert ever

The last time my sister visited me in my single gal Boston apartment was Columbus Day weekend 2004. I took her out to dinner with my friend Melissa at this extra crunchy vegetarian cafe that also doubled as a folk concert venue. I truly thought that I was showing TP the best of Boston's cultural outlets. Squash and goat cheese pizza with a live singer-songwriter chaser. What could go wrong? I gave the performance schedule a cursory glance and noticed that the live act would be a folk family, which is always a risk. The Partridge Family taught us that. So did the Brady Bunch when they gave us Sunshine Day. Everybody's smiling? Inaccurate. But I figured TP would be impressed since she was still in undergrad where live music usually means the emo girl down the hall playing the same Joni Mitchell song over and over on her acoustic guitar, whenever/especially when she's going through a break-up.

Dinner was so good; I remember feeling all mirthy and shiny that two of the best ladies in the land were breaking bread with me and that no animals were killed in the process. We were all three sort of giggly mock-planning my wedding in which both TP and Melissa would be star bridesmaids and it was probably the last time I wasn't stressed about planning my wedding. The fact that Loverpants and I weren't engaged yet may or may not have been super material.

The act began and there was just no question that this was a mistake. There wasn't even an intro song that was rocky that made us think, Oh, well, they're just getting warmed up. It was bad. They weren't necessarily bad musicians. It was that they were embarrassing performers: embarrassing themselves while making every audience member feel entirely ashamed for having stayed.  The mom had this incredible mane of hair, and for every song, the hair was its own instrument.  She was strumming on the guitar but she would hinge at the waist so that her hair swung like this really thick, wavy pendulum. It was hypnotic but also embarrassing. There were lots of stories, too. Ayiyiyiyi. Stories. Anecdotal introductions and interludes and postludes.

Meanwhile, the windows of the basement cafe revealed the foot traffic above in Harvard Square. Taryn, Melissa and I kept looking up at the feet headed to exciting places--wonders untold like dorm rooms and Chinese buffets--and we exchanged raised eyebrows and shifted in our chairs, trying to thwart the magical folk hair force field.

Just as we thought we had reached the official intermission of the program and were about to make a run for it, the folk family brought up their daughter, Anna*. She had been sitting as a patron in the cafe. She was a student at Harvard. Oh, cool. How neat that their daughter was able to attend her parents' performance ANNA GET YOUR DEGREE, HONEY. THEN RUN FAR AWAY. But as they ushered Anna onto stage, it was clear that she needed assistance. She was blind.

Oh. NO. We can't leave now. Who leaves a folk family about to introduce their blind daughter who goes to an Ivy League school and will probably win multiple Nobel Prizes before she even graduates?

Then her mother told us the significance of the next song. It was inspired by how Anna had once developed a brain tumor which rendered her blind. We are the worst humans ever. She had written a letter to Garth Brooks who was so inspired by her fandom and her courage. Seriously, the worst. He sent a limo to escort Anna to his concert and made sure that she had the best seats in the house as she was still going through treatments to shrink the tumors. Us? Nope. Nobody leaving here. Everybody psyched to sit here and listen to "Anna's Angel."

TP and I still sing "Anna's Angel" in spite of our unimpressive manes which could never hypnotize anyone. It is our penance for trying to pull ditch on A Mighty Wind: Cambridge-style, 2004.

*Names changed to protect the innocent.

Lies about seashells

The seashells that make it into the collection, the ones that are worthy of gluing onto jewelry boxes and displaying in glass lamps are the whole ones. They are the bleachy white sand dollars, the shiny conch shells, the hardy raveneli. We search for the ones who have come through the storms at sea and remain in tact. But the lie we believe about seashells is the same lie we believe about ourselves. Because both people and shells who've not suffered a few dings, dents, cracks in their exterior are usually not very interesting. The ones who appear stage-ready with very little effort have secrets to tell. Rarely are they innately more impressive or distinctly beautiful. It's just they've been protected or had a distinct advantage on their journey here. The cracked ones, the ones who are missing a piece, the ones who are nicked with a few holes--these are the ones with epic tales.  These are the ones we stand back and wonder, how? How are they still able to drift over waves and dunes and land here, still shining as sunbeams glint off their jagged edges?

***

We spent the week on Tybee Island with my old man and stepmom and their two pugs. We introduced the old man to American Ninja Warrior. I think he's hooked. Or, in his words, "At least I know not to turn it off immediately when it's on." It's really something to watch the old man with the dings in his back and all the white hair we gave him relish these moments with a five and seven year-old, lifting them up over cresting waves and accepting their sandcake offerings as if all of this beach tomfoolery were brand new. As if he'd never known the wonder of the seaside with children before.

***

We took a trolley ride through Savannah one afternoon. Savannah with her mossy splendor ravishes me in ways that are more like a lusty romance than a fondness for a city. I think her combination of history and mystery make her unlike any other place I've been. The tour guide covered all the major players from Eli Whitney to Forrest Gump (ha!). She didn't spare us any unflattering anecdote about John Wesley or about slavery itself. History has a way of exposing the jagged edges of our shells that are undeniable. But as the tour wrapped up, we passed a housing development. The tour guide tried to direct our attention to the magnificent railyards across the street, but there was a nagging sense for anyone onboard that we were being diverted. The mansions and the fountains and the art districts well-preserved are all ruddy shells. Heaven forbid we talk about housing projects, though. We can't be looking at the difficult to explain, the less-than-ideal. Just like a clam shell that we cast back into the ocean, we look away from shells now occupied. We prefer to study the vacated, the accomplished shells, the cockles and raveneli who've weathered the storms and who came out unscathed.

The lie we believe about seashells--that the most beautiful ones are the ones who are unoccupied and unmarred--is the same lie we believe about ourselves. Ask any woman who has given birth if she felt at her most beautiful right after having a baby. She has just, with every fiber of her being, brought new life into the world. The magazine headlines will convince us that she can get her pre-baby body back in six weeks time, right on cue for bikini season. I say she will look awesome, sitting seaside under an umbrella with her baby, a mindless book, and a few cracked shells catching the sunlight.