DIARY OF A MAD SIBLING
I was ten when I experienced the childhood trauma of losing my oldest friend. Oh, I never lost my Best Pal, Harvey. We were buddies within weeks of meeting in Mrs. Spenser’s first grade class at Delaware Trails Elementary (the builders found a Delaware Indian arrowhead when they were excavating to build our school). In fact, Harvey and I are still so close these seventy years later that I know he is reading this essay — aren’t you, Pal?
But even though we met when I was only seven, Harvey is my second oldest friend. My oldest friend met me just days after my grand entrance into the world. She is my only sibling: my sister Gloria, who is three-and-a-half years my elder and so won the title of Oldest Friend through chronological proximity.
We did everything together — until she was old enough to have neighborhood and school friends. But even then, she mostly had just her kid brother to entertain during all her hours at home. . I “me-too”-ed her to death, and she went along with it, since she loved bossing me around, and I was too dumb to know I was being bossed. As a toddler, I probably thought she was some kind of pygmy parent whom I needed to obey in order to be loved.
But all that changed when she became a teenager, and I was still a “betweenager” — between a kid and an adolescent. Gloria seemed lost to me. It would be just a temporary loss, of course. Ever since we were in our twenties, fifty years ago, we have been the most buxom of bosom buddies. We are not just siblings now but also Cherishers of a bazillion family memories that only we two share.
But it was touch and go when she started at a different school from me, the junior high school a few miles away from Delaware Trails. She was thirteen going on sixteen, and I was an embarrassment. She was already becoming interested in boys, who were all of three years older than I was, but puberty fell between me and them. I might as well have been in diapers, in Gloria’s view.
She was invited to all her Jewish male classmates’ bar mitzvah parties in seventh grade. She was a really good dancer, and they always had dance contests, with the DJ giving a prize of a popular 45 RPM record. I still vividly remember the one she won that year.
It was 1957, and Elvis was hotter than a pistol. Outside my family, he was known as “The King”; inside it, he was known by my parents as “The Meshuggener” (Yiddish for “Crazy Person”) due to his gyrating hips and finger wiggling, which made Gloria “crazy” too, for reasons that she probably didn’t understand — but my parents sure did.
For winning one jitterbug contest, she won Elvis’ “Don’t Be Cruel.” This was a record like no other, not just because the song was so good, but because the other side — the “B” side — was “Hound Dog.” In the history of 45’s, this record stands alone as having a smash hit on both sides. It was especially satisfying to Gloria since even though the DJ would give everyone at the party a record as they left, they were always just dud songs and singers who never cracked the Top 100.
Gloria was so excited by her prize that we nearly bonded again by listening to both songs ad nauseum until Mom and Dad threatened to abandon us both and enjoy a quiet rest of their lives where we and Elvis could never find them.
But we didn’t bond. The next week, Harvey was over at our house after school. Since Gloria was out with Mom, we “explored” her room. And there it was: the diary Mom and Dad gave her for her thirteenth birthday just weeks before. I knew she wrote in it faithfully every night. Of course, back then these teenage-girl pink diaries had a tiny lock and key, perfect for keeping snoopy little brothers (Who—Me?) at bay.
But it was UNLOCKED! How careless of her, especially since she kept it just “lying around” in her bottom chest of drawers, under all of her underwear, and within a hollow cardboard box disguised as a large dictionary cover. It took us an hour of frantic but methodical searching to “coincidentally” stumble upon it.
And the contents were better than we could have hoped. We hit the mother lode of mawkish puppy love. Nothing would do but that I had to read my favorite icky passage aloud to Harvey in my best booming but swooning voice: “I just know Jerry is going to ask me to the school dance! He is SOOOO (Os as hearts) dreamy! He’s a doll!” It still stands as my most dramatic oral recitation.
So enthralled were we that we didn’t hear Mom and Gloria come in from the garage at the other end of the house. But did Gloria ever hear me declaiming from her Holiest Of Holies. She raced into her room, screaming. Before Mom could stop her, she grabbed up all the dud records which had been accumulating from all those parties, and were now collecting dust on her closet shelf. She started hurling them at Harvey and me with amazing force and accuracy. She was already throwing better than I can throw a ball today. We ran out of her room, protecting our heads from her endless barrage of flying missiles.
How fast did we sprint? Let’s just say we got out of there in record-breaking time.
Email Elliot at huffam@me.com or click here