Big Sister

Here's another old family photo that I find endlessly fascinating. Once again my sister is looking rather bad-ass. That's me clinging to her hem, and my brother behind us. I'm not sure what year this was taken, maybe 1963 or 1964.

My sister is seven years older than I am, and my brother is only a year and a half younger than she. I was enough younger than them that parts of my life were like being a single child. For various reasons, however, when I reached adulthood I knew my brother much better than I knew my sister. She was always away, it seemed. When we lived on Yap, she went to high school at Seabury Hall on Hawai'i. When we came back to Oregon, she went off to college in Goshen, Indiana at a Mennonite school that our father had also attended, and when she graduated from the University of Oregon a few years later, she went to teach in the distant ranching community of Fields, Oregon, down near the border with Nevada. I suspect from things she's told me over the years that this distance was not an accident, and that the defiant looks these pictures captured were not uncharacteristic. When my brother complains that the middle kid is always overlooked, she likes to say that the eldest has it the toughest.

Down in Fields she eloped with a cowboy and, after moving back to Salem with him, gave birth to my niece in the summer of 1976. Not too long after that, she divorced her ne'er-do-well husband and focused her life on raising her child, with a lot of help from our parents. (She said recently that she used to go to their house every weekend and hide in the upstairs bedroom and cry her eyes out at the mess she thought she'd made of her life.) She had known from childhood that she wanted to be a teacher, and she settled into the Salem School District and taught there for thirty years before retiring two years ago at age 52. Gradually over this time I got to know her better. As I mentioned in my previous picture post, I lived with her and my niece at the parental house in Portland in 1983. I had dropped out of school in 1982 to create a brave new world with my girlfriend at the time. When I broke up with her at the end of the year and came home dragging my tail between my legs, it was my sister who essentially told me to pull my head out of my ass and finish my degree. She understood my feeling that a degree didn't really mean all that much in the cosmic scheme of things -- she'd dropped out of college for a year herself between Goshen and the UO -- but she told me that above all it would be evidence that I could finish a job. That would be important to potential employers, and to my own self-confidence.

Dang it, she was right! I've always been grateful to her for that particular kick in the ass. Thus I look at these old photos of me holding onto her for support with a lot fondness. So I'll end this post with another one, from 1962, which shows that she wasn't always in a defiant mood -- although she does seem to always be holding me up, doesn't she? Thanks, sis!