by bsquared5@aol.com | Dec 12, 2019 | Thoughts
Families tend to be littered with characters, most of them ordinary–playing their vital roles and fulfilling their duties in matter-of-fact ways–and a few exceptional, the sprinkles on what might otherwise be a rather vanilla family cupcake. My mother’s younger sister was the sprinkle.
I knew nothing of their childhood until I’d grown well past my own. My mother’s sister was the only one who ever called her Ethel, her given name, instead of Sally. Even as a kid, this drew me to my aunt as a holder of mysteries, a figure able to conjure things about my mother no one else could. But I admired a host of things about my aunt. For one, she had one of those quintessential double Southern names that you pronounced all of a piece–Bar-bran. Barbara Ann. She used it as it pleased her, going as Barb or Barbara professionally and slipping casually into the double moniker when she visited family. I imagine she got a lot of mileage in her mid-twenties out of the Beach Boys’ smash hit. I know every time it crossed my radio’s air waves–Ba Ba Ba Ba BarbaraAnn–there was only one face I pictured.
In contrast to my rather gallumphing, tomboyish tumble of a family, Barbara Ann was a movie star. She might have seemed more at home posing with Princess Margaret or Jackie O than hobnobbing with our lot. On a visit to our grandparents’ home, we’d pile out of the family station wagon, rumpled and cranky like a pack of stray dogs, and she’d breeze in later, headlights sweeping across the front window, usually having driven straight from work with her single son in tow. She’d climb out of her sedan with hardly a wrinkle in her pressed pant suit, smelling of perfume and cigarettes. We were solid suburbanites; she’d lived in the big sprawling city of Atlanta ever since she’d left the sleepy fishing town of Panama City to forge her path. She casually drove its spaghetti highways and thought nothing of commuting downtown in the city my father never drove through without white knuckles and cursing.
In the mornings at my grandparents’, where there was only one small bathroom, she’d rise early with a cup of coffee and settle in at the dining room table. Here, I’d watch, fascinated, as she set up a lighted, magnified mirror and pulled out a tackle box full of creams, paints, colors, and brushes. Under her expert hand (where had she learned this wizardry?), she’d transform her angled pixie face like a canvas until she looked like a magazine model. No one in my family did this. My mother’s beauty regimen consisted of baby oil and lipstick. Barbara Ann had nowhere to be and no one special to see, Lord knows not on the docks by the bay, but it made her feel good to look good, she said. And she did. Her trim, petite frame was always draped with artful size two clothes and her dark, curled locks always tidy. She’s the reason I don’t leave the driveway without at least a cursory attempt at being presentable.
She lived on a sloping, wooded lot with a creek in a two-story house which she filled with a mix of Art Deco furniture and glassware she’d scoured from antique shops. The woman could shop. She knew just where to go to get a bargain, and her closet was a treasure trove of colors and style. On one visit back in the early 80’s, she sat my mother and me down on her silk-covered bedspread and instructed us on the finer points of the Color Me Beautiful philosophy, trying different scarves and draping us with colors to demonstrate her point. “See?” she rested her case. “You’re winters,” she told us. “Neither one of you was ever meant to wear mustard yellow,” something I wish someone had told me before my 7th grade school pictures.
She managed to make it look easy: living as a single mother in that big house, taking care of everything. She had the tenacity of a hungry badger, going after what she wanted and standing up for herself. Facing some rough seas, she did battle against those she saw as takers, refusing to let injustice have its way. Some of this she learned from her father, a salty burl of a man who had his own way of doing things. She once helped him pilot his fishing boat down the Gulf coast from Mobile, Alabama to Panama City–in a full-out hurricane because it seemed a good a time as any and a little wind never hurt anybody. And some of her spunk and perseverance she got from her mother, who single-handedly cared for Barbara Ann’s disabled brother for decades. Perhaps this is what enabled her to remain a die-hard Braves fan for so long, despite–well, everything.
While Barbara was certainly beautiful and carried herself with poise, she could hoe a row of okra, kill a snake in the creek, and knew how to catch a fish that weighed twice what she did. She knew how to laugh and loved to dance. She had vices: she could hold a grudge with both hands and never let go; she couldn’t give up cigarettes. If you crossed her, she might jerk a knot in your tail, but she was a softie inside, taking in ugly stray cats and watching the birds from her window. After my mother passed away, I know Barbara keenly felt the sting of that sister-loss. We should have spoken more, should have visited more often, but hearing my mother’s voice come out of her mouth–that familiar cadence and the way she rounded out her O’s with the trace of an accent–would completely unravel me every time we spoke. The ghostly echo was uncanny.
A woman named Jenny Joseph wrote a poem in the early 60’s that became the mantra for aging gracefully. The first bit goes like this:
When I am an old woman I shall wear purple
With a red hat which doesn’t go, and doesn’t suit me.
And I shall spend my pension on brandy and summer gloves
And satin sandals, and say we’ve no money for butter.
I shall sit down on the pavement when I’m tired
And gobble up samples in shops and press alarm bells
And run my stick along the public railings
And make up for the sobriety of my youth.
I shall go out in my slippers in the rain
And pick the flowers in other people’s gardens
And learn to spit.
This, fittingly, reminds me so much of Aunt Barbara. She and her Red Hat Ladies spent some fine times in their slippers learning how to spit. I’m sure she was right at the helm of that particular ship, sailing into the hurricane with her face to the wind, determined to hit the shore of 80. Happy birthday, Barbara Ann. Have a cupcake wherever you are. And make sure it’s got plenty of purple sprinkles.
by bsquared5@aol.com | Nov 26, 2018 | Thoughts
If you’re lucky, despite your lack of merit or any earned grace, you may be fortunate enough a handful of times for a kindred spirit to come alongside you and walk a ways. Over three decades ago, due to the single-handed determination and strong will of her mother, one of those unlikely blessings knitted herself to me at the fragile and tenuous age of fifteen.
Today marks her fiftieth birthday. At the entrance to yet another decade we are lucky to face together, it strikes me that one of the things that most binds us is that we knew each other when. Should time clasp its stingy fingers around one of us, which inevitably it someday will, the other will remain to testify to our children. I knew her when.
What a different portrait we can paint than what our children know of us. To them, our moniker is simply “mom,” our presence a given in their universes. Everyone needs a person like this to keep them humble and grounded, to remind them of past innocence and the effort it took to get from there to here. She and I know each other differently, deeply, because we linked arms to weather puberty and periods, chemistry and college, self 
discovery and the social minefield of high school and beyond. We’d go out on the weekends with friends, me perched on the lid of the toilet while she did her hair and curled her eyelashes. There were braces and boys, angst, acne, and anxieties. Maybe our collective offspring would find it amusing to hear of our exploits, the episodic stories of our coming of age perhaps quaint or provincial to such sophisticated and worldly young adults of 2018. But maybe there’d be a little shock and awe thrown in for good measure at what we each have overcome.
One of my sisters dubbed her “four o’clock Michelle,” because every afternoon after school, our phone would ring and I’d tie up the line for a couple of hours as we downloaded the events of each day. Weekends, we swapped time at each other’s houses, our mothers in the background doing whatever it was mothers did. 
She taught me how to make excellent snicker doodle cookies, coached me through calculus and chemistry, and exponentially upped my ping pong game in her family’s basement.
Together, we were “not from around here,” having moved in to start high school from out of state–she from Ohio, me from Florida. We shared a lack of southern accents, lots of siblings, and a love of Abba. If that doesn’t say soul sister, I’m not sure what does. We danced to Bananarama and Madonna in the 80’s, were each other’s maids of honor in the 90’s, and compared experiences with marriage and raising children in the 00’s and beyond. I learned to two-step at her wedding when she married that boy from Texas, and, years later, it was her mom I turned to for parenting advice in the absence of my own mother.
Even twenty-five years after my mother’s funeral, she calls or texts on that anniversary to remember and say she’s thinking of me. I follow her parents’ and siblings’ lives, cheer for their successes, and worried over her dad’s recent heart issues. When I saw her standing with her family while we took pictures after my daughter’s wedding, my eyes stung as the emotions welled up. She’s always present for the stuff that matters.
Once, for a month, we were roommates on a college campus. Although we spent almost every moment together in regular life, we didn’t do so well as live-in roomies. Too much of a good thing. But the summer her family camped across the West for a month, I almost died from loneliness. It was before cell phones, and waiting four whole weeks for our reunion was the worst kind of torture. We got used to separation, attending different colleges, for instance, in different states. For years, I visited her in Chicago, Minneapolis, and Texas, while I stayed put with a family business in Tennessee.
For now, she’s only a short drive from here, and we’ve been able to visit more often, each time picking up where we left off, falling into real conversations and the ease and comfort of each other’s company. In construction circles, there’s a thing carpenters use to aid a weak or sagging joint. Apparently, the easiest way to repair a compromised joist is to attach another board of equal or larger size alongside. This board is called–wait for it—a sister board, and the process is known as “sistering.” How brilliant is that? It’s the perfect illustration for life-long friendship, for the person who steps in and holds you up when you’re sagging, who knows just where you need help and just where you’re strong. Who knew you when, knows you now, and loves you anyway. Happy 50th birthday, sister! 
by bsquared5@aol.com | Sep 11, 2014 | Thoughts
I am officially “old” today. My oldest kid turns 18, the moment she’s been waiting for, when the heavens open up and the angels come down and bestow upon her the title of Adult, Grown Up, Legal. She can magically do lots of things today that she couldn’t legally do yesterday: vote, smoke, get a tattoo, buy a house, sign a lease, get married, change her name, buy a lottery ticket, get medical attention without consent, open a bank account, own a stock, get a credit card. In short, she is now Completely Free to make lots of binding decisions that can affect the rest of her life. If that’s not enough to age you as a parent, I don’t know what is.
The day she turned 5, I was handing out birthday cupcakes to happy kids in her kindergarten class. That day, as it turns out, was also the day the World Trade Towers fell in New York City, the Pentagon was hit, and UA Flight 93 crashed in Pennsylvania. A few weeks earlier, I’d braced myself to hand over my firstborn to teachers at a new school and now all I felt like doing was holing up in a safe bubble at home forever.
Because of the date, every birthday she’s had since then has been filled with memorials and pictures on the news and internet that never fail to bring back the exact emotions of that morning–panic, horror, fear, disbelief, despair. Instead of giving into that fear, like everyone else, I learned to take a deep breath and forge on. It was a good lesson for me to learn as a mom early on because over these past 13 years I have been constantly faced with a series of “trusting and letting go” moments as my daughter jumped into life with both feet.
As an Official Adult, she can, as Ghandi said, go forth and be the change she wants to see in the world. When people ask when her birthday is, she used to kind of mumble the date and wait for the inevitable reaction–Oh. Like she bore a disfiguring scar that she’d suddenly revealed. I think the distinction has had an effect on her but not what you might expect. With each passing year, she’s learned to wear her birthday like a badge, not a scar. She has adopted a “yes, but” mentality, which has leaked out into other areas of her life.
Yes, 9/11 was a terrible day in our history, BUT it’s my birthday and we can celebrate THAT. Yes, I messed up big that time, BUT each day is a new one and I can start over. Yes, children are dying from hunger every day, BUT I can do something about things I’m not okay with (18000 for 18000 is an organization she started with her friend to make a difference).
I love that 9/11 doesn’t hold her back. I love that she wakes up each September 11 excited about the day and eager to face it, DESPITE the feelings that creep back in each time it rolls around. I love that she reclaims her right to that day as her own, unmarred by the cowardly acts by despicable men. I hope she will use her Newfound Freedom of Adulthood to do great things and plant seeds of goodness. Freedom is the watchword of the U.S., our foundation and one of our greatest values. It is what others tried to take from us in acts of terror, but fittingly, it is also our rallying cry and the cement that binds us together, enabling us to rise up in opposition and stand firm. Now that she’s 18, and legally “free,” I hope my daughter will spread those wings of hers as she was meant to. I hope she will come to see her freedom as a gift that’s ultimately meant for responsibility as well as exploration. And, I hope she’ll have a blast letting her freedom ring! Happy 18th Birthday, Sav!
