Sibling Love and World Peace

ON LIFE IN THE OLDEN DAYS, AND BEING RAISED BY ONE’S SISTERS

The Moreland girls c 1944 – r to l, Helen, Jane, Mimi & the author

Among the blessings I regularly count, my three older sisters rank close to the top. A favorite niece and I, in fact  — she grew up in an identical family structure — maintain that if only everyone could be the youngest of four girls we would have world peace.

Guys would have be factored in somewhere, but the only brothers I’ve intimately known are the three gems my sisters found. This is a sister-sibling story, told by the one they raised.

I’ve now outlived them all, the sisters and their three good guys alike. Looking back over how they shaped my own story is something I do, gratefully, pretty much every day — but it’s a special event of August.

Why August? Well, by August the searing days of summer are slipping into the past, the energies of fall and all its possibilities visible ahead. Baseball season is working itself into pre-pre-playoff frenzy. Everybody has left Paris and New York except for the tourists. And really, what else are you going to do with August? Having missed National Siblings Day (April 10) and International Brothers and Sisters Day (maybe March 29, maybe May 2) I decided to declare August National Youngest of Four Daughters Month.

For openers, August 2nd is the birthday of my sister Mimi. If everybody could have a sister Mimi we would definitelyhave world peace, because she would already have fought everyone’s battles.

When I arrived on the scene my sisters were approximately 2 (Mimi,) 6 (Helen) and 8 (Jane.) The story goes that they so desperately wanted a baby brother that when our father called from the hospital with the happy news they said, “Oh. A girl.” And went back to bed. But by the time I was old enough to hear that story they had rallied around and decided to bring me up as happily as they could.

Our mother was part of it all, but she was pretty much on overwhelm. The demands of being unpaid 24-hour assistant to our father in those post-Depression/ WW II years would’ve wiped out any less-determined wife; but she was simultaneously running the house, hostessing receptions, sewing clothes, gardening, darning, teaching Sunday School, you name it. Some time after she died I stumbled across a further clue to my upbringing. It was a line in a story my mother wrote for a family magazine that read, “Of course, when our Frances was born we were just tired of raising children.” Oh.

Though nearly two years older, Mimi was just a year ahead of me in school, and until marriages pulled us in different directions we were essentially joined at the hip. Just about everything I needed to know about growing up I figured out by watching Mimi — knowing full well that if I got it wrong she would step in and clean up my mess.

Mimi was utterly fearless, and uniquely competent. Once when the French door wouldn’t open I banged a little too hard on the glass pane and managed to gash my arm. I remember standing there shrieking until Mimi edged me out of the way, reached through to turn the doorknob and sped off to grab some towels. This being the olden days of small-town life, she then put me on the back of her bike and pedaled us off to Dr. Vaughan’s office to get me sewed up; fortunately we got home in time to clean up the bloody trail before our mother returned. Dr. Vaughan was a fine GP but not a highly trained surgeon; I still have the scar as a souvenir of the day.

I learned glamour and propriety from my sister Jane, who was regularly class president, prom queen, those sorts of things. It was Jane who knew how to arrange flowers, serve a soufflé, get out of a bad blind date. Once I sent my six-year-old from Atlanta to Birmingham for a weekend at Aunt Jane’s, figuring I’d learn stuff about young motherhood after he got back. These were the very olden days of air travel, when you could entrust a small child to the stewardess and know he’d be watched over until delivery to the appropriate aunt. (That kid grew up to be a pilot.)

Trying not to seem overly snoopy, I asked my son, on his return, what was best about Aunt Jane’s house. “Oh boy, breakfast!” he said. “For breakfast we had peanut butter and bananas on toast!” And why not?

Having declared for years that she would be the first to die, Mimi did just that, though still in her mid-seventies. In our last conversation, the day before that event, she reported from the hospital where she’d just been taken that her cardiologist son-in-law had come by that morning.

“I asked him to tell me, truthfully, how’s my heart as compared with his heart,” she said. “And he said, ‘about 50%.’ So I said, OK, that’s good.” Mimi never did anything half-heartedly in her life.

Jane, thoroughly exhausted from lifelong role-modeling and COPD, followed Mimi into the hereafter that same year, leaving Helen in Ithaca, NY and me across the country in San Francisco to tie up the generational story. Helen had already demonstrated how to live the good life on one’s own terms — in her home everybody sang or played chamber music in lieu of the TV they never owned — and made sure I finally married Mr. Right, their extraordinary longtime close friend.

But after her husband died and her own health declined to a point where social and cultural activities were no longer possible, Helen spent a good while going to bed and hoping not to wake up. Ferociously agnostic, she couldn’t pray for such an outcome so she did the next best thing: make phone calls saying nice things to people she loved “in case I don’t wake up in the morning.” Thus I have a message left on my answering machine not long before the night she went to sleep, with her daughter rubbing her back, and subsequently didn’t wake up.

“Frannie . . .” she says, “. . . I just want you to know you’ve been the best little sister . . .”

There should be world peace.

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(This essay also appears on my Substack, The Optimistic Eye, where I post usually – if not always – on the political scene and activist thoughts. C’mon over any time; it’s free.)