Sibs

I caught up with an old friend today in an assisted care facility for the first time in more than a year. Due to COVID non-emergency visitations for non-family members were forbidden until recently and were difficult to arrange until the past several weeks. Even now visits must be scheduled in advance on limited days in limited time windows. Uncertainties in my own schedule ruled out visits until today. The fellow has Parkinson’s at a severe enough stage that he needs this level of assistance, but is otherwise healthy. Because of the other residents and staff he has not been entirely isolated, but he has been separated from friends and family for long stretches. It hasn’t been a fun year. It was good to catch up though it is always somehow surprising on a non-conscious level to notice that someone one knew as a youth is a few courses past his salad days – if I didn’t know better, I’d suspect I was aging a bit myself. We’ve been friends for more than 20 years but I’ve known him for 55 because he was part of my sister’s regular posse in high school. They never dated, but they hung out. It was only when I left at the end of the visit (limited to 30 minutes under current rules) that reflecting on this reminded me of the date. Today is my sister’s birthday.
 
Sharon (1950-1995) was 2 years and 5 months older than I, which is a huge difference in the childhood years and significant up through one’s teens – not so much afterward. Her arrival was fortuitously timed for my dad. North Korea invaded South Korea on June 25 (24 this side of the date line) 1950. He was in the Naval Reserve and under the selective service rules of the day he would have been recalled to active duty were he not a father. This was fortuitous for me, too, since… well… had he been recalled I wouldn’t be here at all.
 
Siblings play a major part in one’s own identity formation. (For an only child the lack of a sibling is a major part of identity.) A part of how we think of ourselves is always so-and-so’s older/younger brother or sister. Even if we hate a sib (some do), that, too, helps define us. There is an entire field of psychology dedicated to the subject, which is too complex to summarize in a few hundred words here, but I’d recommend Sibling Identity and Relationships (pic below) for those interested in an in-depth elucidation. Suffice to say for the purposes of this blog that though she’s been gone 26 years (and I’m on the dessert course with only the after dinner drink to follow), a part of me is still Sharon’s little brother.

 
Sharon and I got along fine most of the time. As a tween and teen she definitely helped my awareness of 60s culture in part just by being older and in part because she confidently swam in it when by myself I might have just dipped in a toe. Sharon was the poet of the family and I posted 100 of her poems online at Echoes of the Boom. They are worth a read. In my intro to them I wrote, “Sharon always was in sync with the times. She was a fine hippie in the Summer of Love, she discoed in the 70s, and she could out-yuppie Michael J. Fox in the Reagan years. There is much to be said for being in step, or at least so it seems to those of us whose footfalls are never quite right.” She did things in the right order: a wild child when young (to the point that it is still inappropriate for me to recount my best stories of her in a public forum like this) trending to a conservative lifestyle when older. (I did it the other way around, which had unfortunate consequences.)

1971

Older-sister/younger-brother is probably the least likely combination and birth order to promote sibling rivalry (at least in the absence of others sibs) but of course there is always some. I only wish there were more decades of it than there were.
 

Pup – Sibling Rivalry