She called me this morning from New Orleans, just to tell me how wild everything is down there. Tarot card ladies, skateboarding street performers, and beer to go. New Orleans has it all.
While my mother was in labor with me, my sister was poking her nose around in a fit of curiosity. I'm sure that's a bizarre scene for a six-year-old to witness, and as a consequence of her curiosity, my water broke all over her.
So I guess you could say that we got off on the wrong foot.
For the next twenty years, she made it her personal business to make my life miserable, with surprising success.
I think my father carried the "internal rage gene", because my sister and I both appear to posses it. There's a famous tale about how my father once slammed a car door so hard that the window shattered.
I know that somewhere in the back of my mind, I'm fearful of ever acting like that, so I focus all my rage and anger inside. My defiance causes me to resist my nature. My sister doesn't seem to have that kind of control, so she acts out vocally when she's furious. For most of my childhood, her rage was focused almost exclusively on me.
I applied mine to brutal hardcore drumming and general artistic expression.
At one point, it got so bad that my sister and I stumbled into a fistfight while on the phone with my mother.
Three kids and a number of years later, she's mellowed considerably.
She no longer punishes me for being me, she no longer feels the need to judge everything I do, and she seems content to actually appreciate me.
And today she called me, completely out of the blue. Wondering the streets of New Orleans, she randomly decided to call me and tell me how her day was going.
