Sisters

From 1950 to 1956, I think it was, our family lived in an oil camp in Maracaibo, Venezuela, where my dad worked for a Standard Oil subsidiary, Creole. One of my clearest and earliest memories is from late 1952, when my grandmother – my mother’s mom – arrived from Tulsa, Oklahoma. My mother was very pregnant with my sister and my Nana was there to help her out after the birth.

My grandmother was an entity – no other way to describe her. Born in Odessa, Russia, she had emigrated to the U.S. speaking nothing but Russian, and had somehow made a life for herself in the States. She was large, matronly, kind of intimidating, and had been widowed for years. She was also infinitely kind, a lover of animals.

In those days, of course, no one knew the gender of their unborn child. But I had a feeling this child, my sibling, would be a girl. I think my parents had a feeling about it, too, because they had already settled on a name – Mary Margaret. I’m not sure who was honored by the Mary part of this, but the Margaret was my dad’s youngest sister.

At 12:30 p.m. on January 3, my sister, Mary, came into the world. My mother brought her home on the second or third day – this was back when they didn’t kick you out of the hospital the day after! I was five and a half, had been in kindergarten for a few months, had learned to read comic books and was now moving on to real books. I remember sneaking into the baby room after everyone else had gone to bed and staring down at her, this little thing all curled in on herself, beneath a swath of blankets.

And suddenly, her eyes opened. Huge eyes, dark chocolate eyes. And I thought, Wow, where did you come from? We just stared at each other, Mary and I, and in those moments I sensed some sort of strange connection that went through many lives, many relationships. I didn’t have any context into which to fit these feelings, so I quickly hurried back to my own room and crawled into bed.

The photo above was taken in our living room in Maracaibo. I remember that I was initially barefoot and my mother insisted that I put on socks and shoes. I’m not sure why, except that my mother was sometimes a stickler for conventional details. Everyone in a family photo wears socks and shoes!

Today, that little thing next to me in the photo is 63 years old, an R.N. who has overseen an assisted living facility for more than a decade. In February, she will become the regional nurse for a new company in Georgia that owns several facilities. She has three grown sons and, more than a year ago, met a new guy, Neal, who, as she puts it, is the guy she’s been looking for her entire life.

Mary and I, like many siblings, have had our ups and downs. But the blood link is stronger than any disagreement you encounter through the years. In a larger, cosmic sense, it may be why we are born into a particular family at a particular time. I still remember looking down at that little thing all those years ago and thinking, Wow, we really are in this together!

Happy Birthday, Maruja!