Reflections on a Family Story
My first act in this world was, tellingly, to inconvenience my siblings.
Ask any of the five older than I and they’ll say it was simply the start of a pattern that would continue for the next ten to fifteen years, by which time most of them were able to flee the nest and the repercussions of my unpredictability. But on this particularly golden October afternoon, all they registered was the immediate disruption to their free time. Or so it has been repeated through the ages: my parents motoring down the street, down the hill, past all the yards used for play, past the Brunswick school, until they came upon my brothers engaged in a neighborhood football game at the last house on the block. My dad pulling briefly to the curb, calling out “Go home!” before turning the corner in the direction of Greenwich Hospital.
Being that I was still - for a brief while longer - in utero, I have to imagine the scene play itself out. Imagine my oldest brother Davey, blessed and cursed with the pacific, protective demeanor of the eldest child, snapping his 11-year-old- (but always mistaken for older) self to attention, replying with a wave and call. And although he was ready to trot obediently home, he would have had to turn and extricate his oblivious 9-year-old brother from a pile of buddy bodies, pried the football from his fingers and tossed it back to the rest of the boys, and steered him up the street, brushing stray leaves and dead grass from his sweater and cropped hair.
My parents had good reason to bid Davey hasten home. There weren’t abandoned babies in the brown shingle and yellow clapboard colonial at the top of the hill, but there were younger sisters. And while ten-year-old Diane might have, with great romance and importance, resolved to mind her little siblings in the excitement of the rush out the door, it was a distinct possibility that she might only dote on almost-five-year-old Denise and almost-three-year-old Dawn until something more interesting captured her attention. Like a book. Or a story she was writing. Or a picture she was drawing. In which case the adorable babies would morph into hamperers of art, and would be dealt with accordingly. Which is to say, with little patience. So it was best that Davey and Dougie were soon crunching across the gravel driveway and trodding up the painted back porch stairs, locking the door behind them. Between the three of them, they could hold down the fort, man the phone and dispense crackers and milk until Dad returned. Not wanting to leave them along as dusk fell on a school night, he would head the herd until Nana or Angela or Timmie could show up and keep an eye out, and then he’d make his way back to Mom and the new arrival - a child with big blue eyes who would butt heads with him at every opportunity over the next 25 years.
Shortly thereafter, the boys would get the news that any hope of gaining another brother, someone else to play football with and balance the rising tide of estrogen at 18 Maher, had been shot down with the arrival of yet another baby sister. Of course it was a sister, because a brother would not have made them miss the end of their football game. And no brother would ever have grown up as moody and mercurial and damned annoying, from the moment I disrupted the drive on second and five.
Oh, I’d know the feeling when the next baby came, with her even more inconvenient birthday of October 30th, bringing a built-in ban on participating in Doorbell Night mischief. By then the three oldest were teens or nearly so, so maybe they were more forgiving or accepting or better at getting around responsibility. Because while I bemoaned the ruination of Halloween and Doorbell Night, no birth story ever seemed to eclipse the disappointment of that call from the car window of “Goooo Hooooome.”
So maybe I should call them up this afternoon. Finger the laces on a pigskin, see if they have time for a toss. You’d need a good arm to pass from Connecticut to New Jersey to Maryland. But we’d figure out a way. Because after 49 years that sibling bond, however irritatiing the recipient, still binds. And that sibling call, however needy or not, is still answered immediately. We learned that on Maher Avenue, in that three-story yellow and brown house. "Go Home." And we always do.
Hike.
