An essay
My moms found this autobiography that I wrote when I was 18 (I'm assuming for a college class). It's a little wordy, but I like it. I like that I love my family so. much.
So here I am. It’s eleven forty three at night. I have a pair of dollar store glasses on my head. They are orange stars that slip off my head every time I laugh. And now by the fifth sentence in this ten-page paper you’re asking what his has to do with my family. It’s simple. Everything I do has some stems from the depths of my family no matter how distant, or crazy.
We are a wild bunch; a wild crazy mixed bunch of artists and geniuses. It sounds so immodest to say, “ I am an artist and a genius,” but those who have it know it. They just do. And I live and feed off those in my family that share that with me. They live and breathe life and joy and pain. They live life as an art. It’s every different way one can be an artist. It’s so different and we all learn and grow and laugh and eat coleslaw that my aunt makes that has too much onion.
I know this seems so unorthodox. It’s such a far stretch from “My name is Cass and I’m Irish and I have two brothers and a sister.” You, as my reader, have both cursed and blessed yourself. You have given me a blank canvas that I will splatter with my history. I will use green paint for my siblings and blue for my parents and go from there. It will be a Pollack of my life.
I know this is risk. However, you must bear in mind you asked me who I am. Who made me, how this tiny little seed branched out and now wears star shaped glasses and eats oniony coleslaw. It’s a journey. Inevitable, unending. This is how the passage is best described. Don’t worry, it will solidify; like so much old fat in the Encore dinner tray that no one wanted to put away after the meal. We were too busy painting, singing, living.
One lives eighteen years and you ask an assignment such as “Write all about these 18 years and even before that,” and people just plop down and let some boring sludge, toxic to the soul, leave their person. Your life, your person is so complex I can hardly contain myself to ten volumes. I will for the sake of both our social lives.
It all starts in some place, some home, the address of which is so nonessential. Its outside markings like every other white colonial. The inside, however, is so much like the minds of its residents: cluttered, warm, every weird smell and trinket evoking a deluge of memories. It was 247 Jackson Road. Drive by some time and see the back gate that always swings open and the blooming flowers and the little troll with the wheelbarrow whose paint chips off a little more with every spring. The house was almost a seventh member of the family. Its decay was its charm. Its trampled rugs and wood paneling tell stories we can’t even remember anymore. But they are there, starting back at us from the peeling wallpaper and Hummel figurines. We all lived there, the six of us, but not always. At first it was the two that started it all.
I don’t know how they came together to form this bond that would produce what came out of our home. Divided, they are such different entities. My mother, laughing and vacuuming and speaking in accents from countries that don’t even exist, even when we begged her to stop, secretly instilled so much. We resisted it, but it was her master plan all along. All the maxims stuck and slip out unwillingly as I drop pearls of motherly wisdom on my friends. It will stick to them too. We rolled our eyes but the plan was foolproof. We still roll out eyes. But we smile know as we do it because we know. We know it was more than just the worst joke award we gave her when I was eight. It was a Tao, a Zen. A message that said live and laugh and enjoy it. Use up all you have until it’s all used up or else what’s the good in having it? Use it up and enjoy it all.
She paints. They hang there and they are like little smiles from Bobbi all over the house. She knits. They are like giant hugs that cover me when I sleep and say, “You have to be away from me, but I will love you from where I am.” She sews. They are magenta pajama pants that say “Dance in these and when the people look at you funny make them dance too.”
My father’s art was oratory. What my mother said with catch phrases he said with a verbal sledgehammer. It was all so blunt. ‘I love yous’ were powerful. ‘Feed the dogs’ were powerful. It all meant so much from my father. When he was proud of you, you knew it. When he was angry with you, you knew it. That’s what made the laughter so great. It was authoritative. It resonated in the house. When he shouted “CLYDE’S CAR CRUSHER!” and tickled and rolled over you until you though your organs would squish out all over the sheets but still giggled with delight, everyone laughed. When Daddy laughed everyone knew it was good.
But in the outdoors he was gentle. He made it so beautiful and you had to appreciate it with him. The colors of the tulips and the daffodils were oil paint so thick and vibrant and the bird song was music.
And then we arrived. Like the Noah’s arc of children, we came in pairs.
First came the brothers. This is the part where I sit and stare at my computer and think of a way to properly describe them to their full extent and still add how much I love them. My brothers are a standard of excellence for me. They are my role models. They embody that spirit that all Youngs carry. They are young and party. They make money and spend it on things they like. They buy a house and cover the downstairs bathroom in a collage of stickers, and then invite you to add to the walls all holographic, fuzzy, and scratch-and sniff. They take a picture of your face with sticky film and add it to the patchwork so you can look at yourself, looking at yourself, while you pee.
Mitchell and I, seven years apart, still sometimes communicate in fart noises and ‘dudes’ - short bursts of some lost sibling language. When we were little he would sit at the table and ooze whatever was of the oozing consistency (oatmeal, mashed potatoes, pudding) until we screamed with part revulsion and part amusement. We still tell that story. It’s so hard to capture Mitchell with simply nostalgic stories of the dinner table. He is an amazing artist, for lack of a more powerful word. He hates all the people he doesn’t already love. He is never stagnant. He will cut all his hair off, or fly to Wyoming, or suddenly decide to play the piano. He is hysterical.
Neil is my closest sibling. A sea of five years and a gender separate us. Neil and I bonded in a different way. We are proper and go to plays and dinners. Neil and I are most alike, even thought the four of us share so many traits. We look most alike, not all long and lanky and wispy like the oldest and youngest. We wear nice clothes when it’s important to wear them, we are driven, we network. But we smile and laugh, and when we come home at the end of the day, we take off the corporate/collegiate mask and relax. Neil is hysterical too but in this dry sort of way. We hated each other when we were so small, fighting over phone time, and now we are so close. The way that you are always so close with the sibling you hated the most.
Then came the sisters. I was first. I was born on six twenty seven, at six twenty seven. I don’t know whether it as six twenty seven A.M or P.M but my mother said it was pretty incredible and I have been pretty incredible ever since. I am so much like my brothers and our sister so much like us. Mitchell was born and my parents and himself created him and handed the blueprint down as the rest were born, and we sort of picked and chose what we wanted. Now we share so many interchangeable parts of ourselves we borrow them from one another and dust them off and pass them around.
I dabble. I do everything. Maybe it’s because I’m a little bit good at everything, maybe its because the only thing I’m really good at is dabbling. Maybe I just haven’t made up my mind and one day it will jump out and bite me and I will say, “Yes! I want to be a taffy puller.” But I doubt it. I don’t think any box, any boundary that is considered a job will ever make me really happy to my very core, like the people who really love their job. Maybe they will all just make me a little happy. I am usually happy.
The beginning of my life was a juxtaposed birth: a new life given after three taken. My aunt and uncle and cousin had all been shot on a complete fluke. A hit man went to the wrong house and shot them and left my other cousin alive in body, but not in spirit. That day he spattered some grays and browns, but on top of that, colors of rebirth. The way flowers come from all that volcanic ash. I was the new light, the hope, the proof we would come out and grow and live. They are my namesakes, Cassandra being a clever memorial for my aunt Cass and cousin Sandra. Without the tragedy my name would have been Celine, and I don’t much care for that name.
Oh bla dee oh bla daa, right? Right. Life did go on. Here I am typing and clicking and telling you the story of just how it happened. Six years after that business, my sister was born. She is a sprite. We can’t decide if she’s so fickle because it’s her nature of because thirteen year olds are like that. She is a true Gemini, and with Jennie, you never know which twin you are going to get. You just cross your fingers when you tell her we are out of cereal and hope you come out with all of your appendages. We all watch her grow, the boys and me. She is like some external embryo, growing and changing and learning right in front of our eyes. Morphing just the way we did, but we can only look back and see now. She tries to impress us the way I always try to impress my brothers. She takes after Mitch, the way I take after Neil. Intense and capricious and drawing until the pen becomes just an extension of her long artistic fingers.
There are other, external members of this family. Mainly three left now with deaths and moving and arguing over credenzas. I don’t know any of my father’s family and little of my mother’s. I only knew one set of my grandparents, my mothers. They were wonderful people. Everything at their house was so grandparenty. I ate her egg yokes and she ate my whites and she said she would call people “mud” if they didn’t do something right, and those tissues. She always had those crumbled up tissues in her pockets that grandmothers have. She drank lots of tea. Now my mother carries crumbly tissues and drinks tea, but I miss the original. She died when I was eleven.
Her husband was an extraordinary man. They separated when Miriam, the cousin that survived the shooting, caused some rifts. He is a real genius. He spoke Russian and Korean and Spanish and German and even more. He knows semaphore. Who knows semaphore? He worked on the first ever nuclear plant in the United States. I love to sit and listen about the army, and about calculus, and nuclear plants. He is a jewel, a gem, a fountain of information and wisdom and love. He has geraniums that come up to your hips and he feeds us chicken soup when we come over. We look at his paintings and the songs he writes. I wish I came over more. He is my favorite.
My mother has a sister that we love. We really do, but it’s hard to love a person that gives you Isotoner slippers and toothbrushes with your name on it every Christmas. She tries, she really does, but it’s hard to try with kids when you were a nun for many, many years and just don’t understand us now. She is not part of our clan. She doesn’t know the secret handshake of the Youngs, but we love her anyway. She is like my mother because they have to be, they are sisters. But part of them is so unalike. My mother knows that kids make stains, and make noise, and make trouble. She accepts this. It is part of that Zen. You can’t stop the children from doing that, they are an unstoppable destructive force, and so you might as well get dirty and get silly and get loud with them and enjoy it. It’s hard for my aunt to join the party. Too much conformity and oniony coleslaw will do that to you.
My aunt is married to a man from Egypt. Every family has this person. No one quite knows how he got here, his photograph was just sort of placed on top of the canvass of our family and stapled there, and there he is at the barbecues and Thanksgiving tables. He mumbles a lot and sometimes he makes scary food from Egypt. But he is a nice man, and someone has to be that person.
Outside of the last three family members mentioned, we don’t know too many of the others. I could ask my mom and she would tell me and then I could punch it in here like some fill-in-the-blank fifth grade report. They are not very exciting. They are like other peoples families with cable TV and dogs and tuba practice. Generic. Homogenous.
I didn’t have the things other kids had when I was growing up. Call waiting was unnecessary and rude. Cable TV would make us fat. There were some issues with the microwave and radiation so that didn’t last long. Things broke and we never bothered with them again. Its not that we were tree huggers, we were just poor. Struggle builds character. Paucity yields appreciation. These are things you can use and create with later in life. There were of course people much worse off than us and we gave to them. And the people above us gave to us. Share and share alike, recycle it, and use it up. That was one of best lessons. My mother still just gives and gives: “If it’s in the house than it’s yours too, take it.” Even the pets were reused. None of those top breed dogs that have more status in society than me. Give us the mongrels. They love you best.
We always had pets, because pets make people happy. We always had books too because books make you think. We would read and discuss and even if I didn’t understand what my dad was saying I would nod and absorb. My dad combined the sharing lesson with the literature lesson and told us, “Books are meant to be shared.” We had toys with little pieces that fit together and eventually created something if you worked on it a little each day. We had games that did more than light up and come with a pair of dice. We were educational. It was mandatory.
Of course we did regular things too. We had a great big back yard filled with army men and toads and tricycles that peeked over the grass where we were too lazy to mow. We sang and danced and looked at clouds and bloodied ourselves back there. When it was hot we used all my dads gardening attachments on the hose and let the cool clean water hit us and rinse off our feet. Then we came in and ate popsicles and argued when one of us was hogging the fan. When it was cold we stole all the hats and gloves and made snowmen and ate the icicles off the cottage in the back. Then we came in and drank cocoa and argued when one of us was hogging the heater.
We all did chores too but it wasn’t that bad. My mom let us ruin the carpet and the furniture because it was too much worry to be fussing over it all the time and no fun at all. We vacuumed, and cleaned our rooms, and did the dishes and fed those pets. We should have done more because my mom worked nights and my dad worked days and good kids do all their chores and more. But we were kids and kids invariably hate chores, so we did them when we were yelled at. We all shared. It was more of an age thing. You got certain jobs based on how old you were, not on your gender. That was one of my parent’s way of enforcing equality. Sisters shoveled snow and brothers laundered. Mitch and Neil could take ballet and Jennie and I could drive monster trucks and it was all the same to them. We could be Baptist or Buddhist, as long as we were happy. Creativity requires freedom. We had room to flourish. We designed and erected the master plans for our personalities with so much room for exploration. I spent my years trying on the tee shirts of religion, the socks of my values, the trousers of my interests, purchasing the ones I liked and leaving the others in the fitting room. I liked the orange star glasses of outgoingness.
All the sovereignty left for an innovative system of rules. Trust was the keystone of the arc of independence. Once the support is lost, the arc crumbles. Clothing and apparel was totally our domain, a rule which I think (actually I know) my mother sometimes regretted. We decorated ourselves with our garments. We wore our personality on our sleeves. They acted as another form of creative outlet sometimes good, sometimes bad. Money was negotiable for work. At all costs we had to call if we were going to be late. This breech of conduct was inexcusable. Punishments usually resulted in grounding, with time off for good behavior. If dad lost his temper and grounded you a little too harshly or hollered a little too loud, he called you to the top of the stairs and apologized. Mom didn’t yell but you knew she was disappointed. You just knew, and you hated it. At least with Dad it was over in a few short minutes of shouting so close to your face you wanted to wipe the spit from the end of your nose. They never hit. Hitting was wrong. They hit you with the loss of their trust, and that was a doozey.
We made the other kids jealous. “Look at those Youngs. They are so cool with their originality. They are so hip with their flare.” Maybe not when we were little because they didn’t understand. But as we grew we didn’t need them or their Nikes. We had each other. Suddenly we were the cool ones: we were the trendsetters. We had it in us. The real artists and geniuses know when they have it.
Now our distance is our strength. College, and new homes with sticker-covered-bathrooms and junior high school have ushered in a new era of appreciation for us. We sing and dance and add to the canvas more than ever when we get together now. We love it. Life is an art. We have learned to stand back and appreciate it, even the jagged brush strokes and black paint. The dark moments in life make the work more alive, more vibrant. The pastels are the areas we point to and say, “Remember that?”
And we do.
So here I am. It’s eleven forty three at night. I have a pair of dollar store glasses on my head. They are orange stars that slip off my head every time I laugh. And now by the fifth sentence in this ten-page paper you’re asking what his has to do with my family. It’s simple. Everything I do has some stems from the depths of my family no matter how distant, or crazy.
We are a wild bunch; a wild crazy mixed bunch of artists and geniuses. It sounds so immodest to say, “ I am an artist and a genius,” but those who have it know it. They just do. And I live and feed off those in my family that share that with me. They live and breathe life and joy and pain. They live life as an art. It’s every different way one can be an artist. It’s so different and we all learn and grow and laugh and eat coleslaw that my aunt makes that has too much onion.
I know this seems so unorthodox. It’s such a far stretch from “My name is Cass and I’m Irish and I have two brothers and a sister.” You, as my reader, have both cursed and blessed yourself. You have given me a blank canvas that I will splatter with my history. I will use green paint for my siblings and blue for my parents and go from there. It will be a Pollack of my life.
I know this is risk. However, you must bear in mind you asked me who I am. Who made me, how this tiny little seed branched out and now wears star shaped glasses and eats oniony coleslaw. It’s a journey. Inevitable, unending. This is how the passage is best described. Don’t worry, it will solidify; like so much old fat in the Encore dinner tray that no one wanted to put away after the meal. We were too busy painting, singing, living.
One lives eighteen years and you ask an assignment such as “Write all about these 18 years and even before that,” and people just plop down and let some boring sludge, toxic to the soul, leave their person. Your life, your person is so complex I can hardly contain myself to ten volumes. I will for the sake of both our social lives.
It all starts in some place, some home, the address of which is so nonessential. Its outside markings like every other white colonial. The inside, however, is so much like the minds of its residents: cluttered, warm, every weird smell and trinket evoking a deluge of memories. It was 247 Jackson Road. Drive by some time and see the back gate that always swings open and the blooming flowers and the little troll with the wheelbarrow whose paint chips off a little more with every spring. The house was almost a seventh member of the family. Its decay was its charm. Its trampled rugs and wood paneling tell stories we can’t even remember anymore. But they are there, starting back at us from the peeling wallpaper and Hummel figurines. We all lived there, the six of us, but not always. At first it was the two that started it all.
I don’t know how they came together to form this bond that would produce what came out of our home. Divided, they are such different entities. My mother, laughing and vacuuming and speaking in accents from countries that don’t even exist, even when we begged her to stop, secretly instilled so much. We resisted it, but it was her master plan all along. All the maxims stuck and slip out unwillingly as I drop pearls of motherly wisdom on my friends. It will stick to them too. We rolled our eyes but the plan was foolproof. We still roll out eyes. But we smile know as we do it because we know. We know it was more than just the worst joke award we gave her when I was eight. It was a Tao, a Zen. A message that said live and laugh and enjoy it. Use up all you have until it’s all used up or else what’s the good in having it? Use it up and enjoy it all.
She paints. They hang there and they are like little smiles from Bobbi all over the house. She knits. They are like giant hugs that cover me when I sleep and say, “You have to be away from me, but I will love you from where I am.” She sews. They are magenta pajama pants that say “Dance in these and when the people look at you funny make them dance too.”
My father’s art was oratory. What my mother said with catch phrases he said with a verbal sledgehammer. It was all so blunt. ‘I love yous’ were powerful. ‘Feed the dogs’ were powerful. It all meant so much from my father. When he was proud of you, you knew it. When he was angry with you, you knew it. That’s what made the laughter so great. It was authoritative. It resonated in the house. When he shouted “CLYDE’S CAR CRUSHER!” and tickled and rolled over you until you though your organs would squish out all over the sheets but still giggled with delight, everyone laughed. When Daddy laughed everyone knew it was good.
But in the outdoors he was gentle. He made it so beautiful and you had to appreciate it with him. The colors of the tulips and the daffodils were oil paint so thick and vibrant and the bird song was music.
And then we arrived. Like the Noah’s arc of children, we came in pairs.
First came the brothers. This is the part where I sit and stare at my computer and think of a way to properly describe them to their full extent and still add how much I love them. My brothers are a standard of excellence for me. They are my role models. They embody that spirit that all Youngs carry. They are young and party. They make money and spend it on things they like. They buy a house and cover the downstairs bathroom in a collage of stickers, and then invite you to add to the walls all holographic, fuzzy, and scratch-and sniff. They take a picture of your face with sticky film and add it to the patchwork so you can look at yourself, looking at yourself, while you pee.
Mitchell and I, seven years apart, still sometimes communicate in fart noises and ‘dudes’ - short bursts of some lost sibling language. When we were little he would sit at the table and ooze whatever was of the oozing consistency (oatmeal, mashed potatoes, pudding) until we screamed with part revulsion and part amusement. We still tell that story. It’s so hard to capture Mitchell with simply nostalgic stories of the dinner table. He is an amazing artist, for lack of a more powerful word. He hates all the people he doesn’t already love. He is never stagnant. He will cut all his hair off, or fly to Wyoming, or suddenly decide to play the piano. He is hysterical.
Neil is my closest sibling. A sea of five years and a gender separate us. Neil and I bonded in a different way. We are proper and go to plays and dinners. Neil and I are most alike, even thought the four of us share so many traits. We look most alike, not all long and lanky and wispy like the oldest and youngest. We wear nice clothes when it’s important to wear them, we are driven, we network. But we smile and laugh, and when we come home at the end of the day, we take off the corporate/collegiate mask and relax. Neil is hysterical too but in this dry sort of way. We hated each other when we were so small, fighting over phone time, and now we are so close. The way that you are always so close with the sibling you hated the most.
Then came the sisters. I was first. I was born on six twenty seven, at six twenty seven. I don’t know whether it as six twenty seven A.M or P.M but my mother said it was pretty incredible and I have been pretty incredible ever since. I am so much like my brothers and our sister so much like us. Mitchell was born and my parents and himself created him and handed the blueprint down as the rest were born, and we sort of picked and chose what we wanted. Now we share so many interchangeable parts of ourselves we borrow them from one another and dust them off and pass them around.
I dabble. I do everything. Maybe it’s because I’m a little bit good at everything, maybe its because the only thing I’m really good at is dabbling. Maybe I just haven’t made up my mind and one day it will jump out and bite me and I will say, “Yes! I want to be a taffy puller.” But I doubt it. I don’t think any box, any boundary that is considered a job will ever make me really happy to my very core, like the people who really love their job. Maybe they will all just make me a little happy. I am usually happy.
The beginning of my life was a juxtaposed birth: a new life given after three taken. My aunt and uncle and cousin had all been shot on a complete fluke. A hit man went to the wrong house and shot them and left my other cousin alive in body, but not in spirit. That day he spattered some grays and browns, but on top of that, colors of rebirth. The way flowers come from all that volcanic ash. I was the new light, the hope, the proof we would come out and grow and live. They are my namesakes, Cassandra being a clever memorial for my aunt Cass and cousin Sandra. Without the tragedy my name would have been Celine, and I don’t much care for that name.
Oh bla dee oh bla daa, right? Right. Life did go on. Here I am typing and clicking and telling you the story of just how it happened. Six years after that business, my sister was born. She is a sprite. We can’t decide if she’s so fickle because it’s her nature of because thirteen year olds are like that. She is a true Gemini, and with Jennie, you never know which twin you are going to get. You just cross your fingers when you tell her we are out of cereal and hope you come out with all of your appendages. We all watch her grow, the boys and me. She is like some external embryo, growing and changing and learning right in front of our eyes. Morphing just the way we did, but we can only look back and see now. She tries to impress us the way I always try to impress my brothers. She takes after Mitch, the way I take after Neil. Intense and capricious and drawing until the pen becomes just an extension of her long artistic fingers.
There are other, external members of this family. Mainly three left now with deaths and moving and arguing over credenzas. I don’t know any of my father’s family and little of my mother’s. I only knew one set of my grandparents, my mothers. They were wonderful people. Everything at their house was so grandparenty. I ate her egg yokes and she ate my whites and she said she would call people “mud” if they didn’t do something right, and those tissues. She always had those crumbled up tissues in her pockets that grandmothers have. She drank lots of tea. Now my mother carries crumbly tissues and drinks tea, but I miss the original. She died when I was eleven.
Her husband was an extraordinary man. They separated when Miriam, the cousin that survived the shooting, caused some rifts. He is a real genius. He spoke Russian and Korean and Spanish and German and even more. He knows semaphore. Who knows semaphore? He worked on the first ever nuclear plant in the United States. I love to sit and listen about the army, and about calculus, and nuclear plants. He is a jewel, a gem, a fountain of information and wisdom and love. He has geraniums that come up to your hips and he feeds us chicken soup when we come over. We look at his paintings and the songs he writes. I wish I came over more. He is my favorite.
My mother has a sister that we love. We really do, but it’s hard to love a person that gives you Isotoner slippers and toothbrushes with your name on it every Christmas. She tries, she really does, but it’s hard to try with kids when you were a nun for many, many years and just don’t understand us now. She is not part of our clan. She doesn’t know the secret handshake of the Youngs, but we love her anyway. She is like my mother because they have to be, they are sisters. But part of them is so unalike. My mother knows that kids make stains, and make noise, and make trouble. She accepts this. It is part of that Zen. You can’t stop the children from doing that, they are an unstoppable destructive force, and so you might as well get dirty and get silly and get loud with them and enjoy it. It’s hard for my aunt to join the party. Too much conformity and oniony coleslaw will do that to you.
My aunt is married to a man from Egypt. Every family has this person. No one quite knows how he got here, his photograph was just sort of placed on top of the canvass of our family and stapled there, and there he is at the barbecues and Thanksgiving tables. He mumbles a lot and sometimes he makes scary food from Egypt. But he is a nice man, and someone has to be that person.
Outside of the last three family members mentioned, we don’t know too many of the others. I could ask my mom and she would tell me and then I could punch it in here like some fill-in-the-blank fifth grade report. They are not very exciting. They are like other peoples families with cable TV and dogs and tuba practice. Generic. Homogenous.
I didn’t have the things other kids had when I was growing up. Call waiting was unnecessary and rude. Cable TV would make us fat. There were some issues with the microwave and radiation so that didn’t last long. Things broke and we never bothered with them again. Its not that we were tree huggers, we were just poor. Struggle builds character. Paucity yields appreciation. These are things you can use and create with later in life. There were of course people much worse off than us and we gave to them. And the people above us gave to us. Share and share alike, recycle it, and use it up. That was one of best lessons. My mother still just gives and gives: “If it’s in the house than it’s yours too, take it.” Even the pets were reused. None of those top breed dogs that have more status in society than me. Give us the mongrels. They love you best.
We always had pets, because pets make people happy. We always had books too because books make you think. We would read and discuss and even if I didn’t understand what my dad was saying I would nod and absorb. My dad combined the sharing lesson with the literature lesson and told us, “Books are meant to be shared.” We had toys with little pieces that fit together and eventually created something if you worked on it a little each day. We had games that did more than light up and come with a pair of dice. We were educational. It was mandatory.
Of course we did regular things too. We had a great big back yard filled with army men and toads and tricycles that peeked over the grass where we were too lazy to mow. We sang and danced and looked at clouds and bloodied ourselves back there. When it was hot we used all my dads gardening attachments on the hose and let the cool clean water hit us and rinse off our feet. Then we came in and ate popsicles and argued when one of us was hogging the fan. When it was cold we stole all the hats and gloves and made snowmen and ate the icicles off the cottage in the back. Then we came in and drank cocoa and argued when one of us was hogging the heater.
We all did chores too but it wasn’t that bad. My mom let us ruin the carpet and the furniture because it was too much worry to be fussing over it all the time and no fun at all. We vacuumed, and cleaned our rooms, and did the dishes and fed those pets. We should have done more because my mom worked nights and my dad worked days and good kids do all their chores and more. But we were kids and kids invariably hate chores, so we did them when we were yelled at. We all shared. It was more of an age thing. You got certain jobs based on how old you were, not on your gender. That was one of my parent’s way of enforcing equality. Sisters shoveled snow and brothers laundered. Mitch and Neil could take ballet and Jennie and I could drive monster trucks and it was all the same to them. We could be Baptist or Buddhist, as long as we were happy. Creativity requires freedom. We had room to flourish. We designed and erected the master plans for our personalities with so much room for exploration. I spent my years trying on the tee shirts of religion, the socks of my values, the trousers of my interests, purchasing the ones I liked and leaving the others in the fitting room. I liked the orange star glasses of outgoingness.
All the sovereignty left for an innovative system of rules. Trust was the keystone of the arc of independence. Once the support is lost, the arc crumbles. Clothing and apparel was totally our domain, a rule which I think (actually I know) my mother sometimes regretted. We decorated ourselves with our garments. We wore our personality on our sleeves. They acted as another form of creative outlet sometimes good, sometimes bad. Money was negotiable for work. At all costs we had to call if we were going to be late. This breech of conduct was inexcusable. Punishments usually resulted in grounding, with time off for good behavior. If dad lost his temper and grounded you a little too harshly or hollered a little too loud, he called you to the top of the stairs and apologized. Mom didn’t yell but you knew she was disappointed. You just knew, and you hated it. At least with Dad it was over in a few short minutes of shouting so close to your face you wanted to wipe the spit from the end of your nose. They never hit. Hitting was wrong. They hit you with the loss of their trust, and that was a doozey.
We made the other kids jealous. “Look at those Youngs. They are so cool with their originality. They are so hip with their flare.” Maybe not when we were little because they didn’t understand. But as we grew we didn’t need them or their Nikes. We had each other. Suddenly we were the cool ones: we were the trendsetters. We had it in us. The real artists and geniuses know when they have it.
Now our distance is our strength. College, and new homes with sticker-covered-bathrooms and junior high school have ushered in a new era of appreciation for us. We sing and dance and add to the canvas more than ever when we get together now. We love it. Life is an art. We have learned to stand back and appreciate it, even the jagged brush strokes and black paint. The dark moments in life make the work more alive, more vibrant. The pastels are the areas we point to and say, “Remember that?”
And we do.