I was laughing with my older sister today on the telephone. She is five years older than me which isn’t much but when you are a little kid, those years are a world apart. I am the second oldest so I spent alot of my childhood following my big sister and listening to her ideas and day dreams. Even without my sister’s input, I was always trying to figure things out in life. I had some wacky ideas about things and my older sister only added to my concocted conclusions about things.
For instance, I can remember thinking that white bread turned to wheat bread when it came out of the toaster. When I asked for candy at the super market, my mom would scream “I ain’t got no candy money”! I thought to myself that I wished her job gave her equal amounts of candy money, meat money and vegetable money. It looked to me like all they EVER gave her was meat and vegetable money. I thought that the color of a white person’s hair could be determined by the letters in their names. Teachers whose names ended in vowels had black hair but consonants had blond hair. This formula worked every time. Mrs. Blakeman, Mrs O’Reilly and Mr. Rosenburg all had light hair while Mrs. Fiorelli, Mr. Rizzo, Mr. Mastrogiavonni, and Mrs. Rocchetti had black hair (I grew up in NJ…hey, whaddaya gonna do?).
When I was seven, my older sister told me that boys had three testicles which I believed until I was 16 years old! This same sister who was full of wisdom told me that babies were born from a woman’s anus because why else would they strain the way they do during childbirth. My older sister wanted to share everything with me so when she started reading the pimp and whore stories of Donald Goines, I got to read those too. One day, after seeing a drug bust on the news, I informed my mom that that could not possibly have been heroin in the photos because heroin melts at room temperature and has to be stored in ziplock bags. That began my mom screening my books.
I really don’t have a point to make with this little confession except to say thanks to my older sister for sharing the wisdom.
