Tag: childhood

America Collection/General interest
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Sibling Love and World Peace

by Fran Johns

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.

+. +. +

(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.)

America Collection/General interest
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The Night We Climbed the Water Tower

by Fran Johns

Photo by Arturo Mendez on Unsplash

It was chilly, and very dark; that’s what I remember most clearly.

But where Mimi went, I followed. Mimi was two years older, my best friend and protector and constant companion. She was also braver than I.

I pretended bravery. So when Mimi and our best friend Beverly Ann made a plan to climb the water tower, I was in. We slipped out the front door — nobody watched (or locked) front doors in those gentler post-WWII days — about 10 PM, after the grown-ups had turned off the Victrola and retired. Barefoot and pajama-clad, we ran through the fields to the water tower at the edge of town.

Mimi and Beverly Ann scampered up the ladder and onto the narrow walkway in a matter of minutes. I followed as closely as my fluttering heart would allow, trying not to look down. We made one lap around the tower, looking down but holding tight to the rail; I may have been holding tighter than anyone ever held onto anything in human history.

There were, unfortunately, no selfie cameras in those days; but there was an iron clad honor system reinforced by community norms and the possibility of being ratted out. The next day we three joined the rarefied ranks of Those Who Climbed the Water Tower At Night. This was not a club whose membership was publicized among grown-ups, but it carried more than a little prestige among the under-10 set.

I still pretend bravery. On occasion I prove actually brave. Most of the credit goes to my sister Mimi, may she rest in well-earned peace.

But I no longer climb water towers.

California/General interest/Health/Lifestyle/Medicine/seniors/USA
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You can go home again — but should you?

by Fran Johns

Yearning to go back to your childhood? It may or may not work.

For many of us, memories of what seems such a carefree, safer time are linked to a place. And now, thanks to Google Maps and other sites, we can find – and sometimes physically revisit – those houses and territories at the center of a powerful, nostalgic pull. But, like adoptive children searching for birth mothers (and vice versa), the adventure carries risk. That site at the end of the rainbow might be psychological gold – or it can turn out to be a pot of mud.

Saturday’s Wall Street Journal featured a ‘Journal Report’ article and related story about the going-home phenomenon, including one particularly fascinating segment:

When John Beebe, a Jungian analyst in San Francisco, was invited to speak at a conference in China, he decided he would try to find the house he had lived in there as a child. His father had been a military attaché in the 1940s, and Dr. Beebe remembers living in a “rather grand” house before the family was evacuated and before his parents divorced.

But when he finally found the spot, the house was gone. It had been replaced, in his words, by “drab communist housing.” That visit—and watching “Empire of the Sun,” a World War II movie about a boy separated from, and then reunited with, his parents—triggered overwhelming feelings of grief, Dr. Beebe recalls. “Twenty-seven years of Jungian analysis, and I didn’t mourn my childhood until then,” he says.

“A lot of people haven’t fully left home,” Dr. Beebe says. “Some people need to go back [in order] to move on.” Others, while claiming to be “just curious” about seeing their childhood home, may have a deeper motive, he suggests: a desire to reconnect to the way they felt as a child before life—school, careers and families—required so many compromises. “In adapting to the world, we all lose some of our soul,” Dr. Beebe says. “When we make the journey back, we find some of our soul again.”

As the eminent Dr. Beebe happens to be a friend of this space, that sent us to the telephone to ask for free advice to pass along to readers about the pros and cons of returning to childhood in this manner. (Before signing off on the advice, Beebe said he “wanted to put in a plug for the amazingly good writer Kathleen A. Hughes” who authored both stories referenced above, proving out his own reputation as both acclaimed analyst/speaker and genuine nice guy. This space hereby strongly recommends you go out and buy Saturday’s WSJ.)

As far as the potential benefits of revisiting childhood space go, Beebe says that “for all of us, particularly as we get older, withdrawing the projections we make onto things that interfere with right relationships” can be very good. In other words, perhaps “our parents were not as tall as we thought.” Or that room so huge or that shadow so all-encompassing. “We all have a subjective relationship to childhood,” he explains, “and it kind of ties us to unreality. When we see where (our memory) was right, and where it was wrong, it somehow sets the soul at rest.”

As to the potential pitfalls of geographical/psychological returns, Beebe says that “memory is powerful, but so is reality. Certainly I was more upset than I’d imagined in China. In a way, I hadn’t grieved enough. These returns tend to stir things up; it can be shocking to be flooded with emotions and I didn’t expect this. I was taken by surprise, but ready.”

Making the return, and dealing with possible impact, may be something you don’t want to undertake all by yourself. “As they used to say about psychedelic drugs in the 60s,” Beebe comments, “it’s better to have someone around to guide you through the trip. It’s not good to be alone.”

In my 60s I returned to my birthplace in Porto Alegre, Brazil, where the tales and photos I’d grown up with showing idyllic hillsides overlooking the bay turned out to be a jumble of rooftops and high walls. In my 40s I returned to the site of my earliest memories, the Nashville, TN house in which I remembered running merrily up and down the length of a giant kitchen. It was, in reality, roughly 6′ x 8′. Today Google Maps tells me it’s gone, replaced by what seems to be an educational facility for the church (same old church) that was two doors down the street. As there are too many metaphors here even to begin considering, if I do any further revisitation I may invite John Beebe to go along.

What about you? Any more going-home-again stories out there?