Posted January 21, 2003 Reposted here Jan 5, 2005

Momma was in the next room when the fateful call came. A senior I didn't even know (I'll call her June) was on the line. I didn't know her but I'd despised her little brother, who was in my grade, since he'd sat next to me in music class in Jr. High and whispered nasty things when he thought the teacher wasn't looking.

"I'd like to be your Big Sister," June told me.

"What's that?" I asked suspiciously. Momma's ears must have pricked up at my tone of voice.

"Each Senior girl" (that's the way I remember it, but it can't be right, that would have been too many people. She must have been a member of some club,) "sort of adopts a Freshman. I'll buy you a corsage, and we'll go to the game..."

"The game? Football? I hate football. I don't think this is for me."

"I'll explain everything to you! It will be fun. And then we'll go to a slumber party afterwards."

The slumber party with older girls intrigued me momentarily. But not enough to make the prospect of organized sports appealing.

"What's this about?" Momma asked before I could refuse again.

I put the phone to my shoulder. "She wants to be my Big Sister. Take me to a football game and a slumber party."

"Of course you should go!" said Momma, with almost sit com enthusiasm that was unlike her. But I was young, and my energies were devoted to my own life. That was a moment I could have used to get to know her, and instead her urging served as another blow on the wedge between us.

"Football!" I spat.

"Tell her 'yes'!" Momma said firmly, starting to get angry at my resistance.

"Well, OK," I said reluctantly into the phone.

I glared at Momma when the details were settled. "She'll be like a Sunshine Friend," said Momma brightly.

"What's that?"

"We all had one when I was in high school, and we all were one to someone else. You were supposed to think of nice things to do for your Sunshine Friend, nice surprises, because you had to keep your identity a secret."

"Like what?" I said, not seeing the charm.

"Oh, you know, you'd sneak in little gifts. A pretty picture from a magazine, or something. Why, once when I cleaned out my desk at the end of the year, I found a shriveled-up old apple. My Sunshine Friend had tucked it in there, and I hadn't even known it!"

Writing that after 9-11 really makes you notice how things have changed. In '68 I just wrinkled my nose. "How nice," I said, as snottily as possible.

Momma closed up to me, hurt. "Just do it!" she snapped. "You'll thank me."

Momma wasn't much of a prophet.

June picked up me, my bag with my clothes for the slumber party, and my favorite LPs, and pinned the corsage on me. It was lovely, one of those enormous mums. Mums aren't actually fragrant, but their scent is rather bracing, or I found it so before I'd handled scores of the brittle things a year.

The game itself went better than I expected. That's because we spent most of it among the bleachers, searching for the other Big and Little Sisters. It was a nightmare for June, who was an anxious girl with her heart set on getting this right, but I had a great time following her around and not being asked to pay attention to what was going on down there on the field.

When we finally found the others, the game was almost over, so we got through the School Spirit component of the night's entertainment painlessly enough, and moved on to the slumber party.

I was one of those unpopular kids who makes a few, close friends in school. Pat, my oldest friend I'm still in touch with, used to claim I have a window of memory. If it happened before that window, or after it, my mind's a blank. So it should come as no surprise if I'm not sure if Pat was at the party or not. She would have been quiet if she was. I stayed close to two friends of hers, exuberantant girls I already knew. There was nothing at the party stronger than caffeine, but a houseful of teenage girls could get pretty noisy on bread and water. There must have been an adult there, but they didn't make an impression on us, whoever they were.

We made so much noise, the neighbors called the cops on us.

Looking back on it, I guess it was a lesson that just because you attract the attention of the cops, it doesn't mean you're going to prison. However, when I was four or five years old and my father asked an officer for directions, I uttered the immortal words "He was a nice policeman. He didn't arrest us," and that's pretty much been my feeling about law enforcement since them. The other girls didn't seem to mind, but I was mortified. Momma was going to ask me how the party went, and I was going to have to lie or admit the horrifying smirch on my honor.

I'm pretty sure my answer was, "It was OK."

The worst of it was, I came home with the empty jackets of two of my favorite albums: Surrealistictic Pillow (Jefferson Airplane) and Cream's Disraelilli Gears, I think, or possibly something by Cat Stevens with a blue cover. That was in the young spring of my life, when, once an album went out of print, I thought it was gone forever. I asked June to help me get them back, but nothing ever came of it.

I thought of those lost albums every time I saw her from then on. It wasn't her fault, of course, but if Momma would have let me follow my instincts and not urged me to take June up on her offer, I'd still have had the records.

Something by Dylan lost its jacket, and I kept it in the Surrealistic Pillow cover, keeping the wound fresh every time I played that record. That's how petty I am.

I learned about used record stores when I went off to college in Madison, and replaced Surrealistic Pillow, but Disraelilli Gears took years longer to stumble across. I wonder if June felt a little lessening of her own woes when I let go my resentment?

Momma's Sunshine Friend wasn't my Big Sister, and I resented Momma, too, for trying to make my life over into hers. I wish I could have been bigger. I wish I could have seen what she was trying to give me, and I wish I could have drawn her out about what had been so precious to her, that she wanted me to have it too. If not then, then later, when I was a grown woman, before she died.

It's a pity we meet our parents before we know ourselves, isn't it?

By Ruby Jung. All rights reserved to the story. Background Copyright © 2005 Ruby Jung and licensors. All rights reserved