Linda

So Monday is my sister Linda's birthday. I won't tell you how old she is, but I will say I have known her all my life. I've seen and done a lot of crazy shit with Linda around(note to my Mom, that part's made up! Haha!). I may not choose to implicate my dear sister in any infractions of the law(again, Mom, figuratively speaking!), but just know we've been chased in the car fearing for our lives on two separate occasions(exaggeration), and both times she was driving(and wearing her seatbelt). And I'm still here, so thanks to her quick maneuvering and thinking we got out of a lot of sticky jams. She taught me the joys of vandalism(which we have never committed, my dear nephews! Toilet paper belongs in the bathroom), which would one day turn around on me, but at the time it was a blast. We were pros with the toilet paper and the jumbo sized bottle of dish soap, ready to squeeze driveby style on a car window as we drove through a sleeping neighborhood and blasted everything we saw. We were assholes, but for a while it felt so liberating to be such assholes(note to Linda's sons--don't be assholes). We salted dirty words into front lawns, to kill the letters a dead yellow against the green. We threw slices of deli bologna onto the hoods of those who trespassed us. (All right, we did do all that. I can't keep up with all these edits. I'm done!)

It's too bad you, the reader, never had such a badass sister like I do. I remember one time I was fighting with my friend Joe and she trapped him in our garage and lectured him for nearly an hour about the virtues of me and my friendship, and at the end of the interrogation/lecture Joe came out and hugged me, and told me he was sorry. She did something terrible to his brain and his psyche, but he bounced back ok, and we became much closer after that. Me and Joey, I mean.

But it wasn't always the good times growing up with Linda as my big sister. One time was kind of a drag, and I call that the Story About The Time I Got a Fish Hook Stuck in Linda's Head. It's a little gruesome, so the more queasy of you, maybe skip this one. All right.

So, my brother Scott was dating a girl named Kat, whose father had a pond on his property that he kept stocked with various fishes, some of them so nasty he'd feed them roadkill he'd scraped from the sides of the road. He kept a shovel in the back of his truck for that express purpose. So, I guess someone thought it would be a good idea for Scott to take us out there and go fishing for fish that eat dead mammals. Makes plenty of sense. I think me and Linda were at that age where we were at perpetual war. Our battles always began with her verbal taunting, a sort of soul crushing chatter that could make someone just lose their shit and start beating ass. And it wouldn't take long until I had suplexed her onto the floor or wherever. She'd get in my head and tell me wrestling was "fake," and I'd boil until the lid blew off and I'd have her in a figure four leglock, yelling, "Does this feel fake? Does it?" And then she'd say I hurt her, and I'd stop and feel guilty and she'd make me feel worse.

So, this went on for a few years, and I may have given her a beating on that day, but I don't remember. I just remember casting my line into the water and not catching a thing. The bait would be nibbled and gone, but I never would feel it getting taken. And my brother was off somewhere balling his girlfriend so we had nowhere else to be. But after a while it was time to go when they came back and I guess I wasn't ready to leave then. I knew I didn't have any bait on the hook, but I kept casting out and reeling it back in. Like a dumb little robot on repeat, cast the line, reel it in. Scott was packing up his tacklebox and I took one last cast but when I went to throw my arm foreword, it wasn't snapping through the air. And I tugged, a few times pretty hard, and i guess I didn't realize the bare hook got stuck on something. Or, in this case, in something.

I couldn't get it in the water because I'd hooked Linda in the back of her scalp and somehow worked the hook into her skin. I don't remember her screaming, not at least until I turned around and realized what had happened. It's pretty gross to see a fish hook stuck in your sister's head. Overwhelming, even.

And sometimes it felt like I was born with an overwhelming sense of guilt, so seeing Linda with the line leading down into her hair, still hooked by my fishing pole, it broke my brain. I felt like I had killed her. I don't remember how we got there but all of a sudden we were all inside and grown-ups were holding her under the lights and smoothing her hair along the part so they could see where the hook went in. Things were further complicated by the barb on the hook, a nifty metal prong added to hooks to keep it good and stuck inside the fish's mouth. This barb was lodged in her head pretty good. They worked it out somehow with some careful amateur doctoring and we eventually went home. I don't remember what my Mom said when we came home and Scott told her what happened. I seem to be mentally blocked there!

But she survived her head hooking and we grew up some and became better friends, but sometimes we'd fight, never long enough for it to stick, I guess.

And we became adults and had more crazy adventures, too insane to recount here, but I've found that spending time with my sister meant there was going to be some sort of pursuit of cataclysm, but despite the years of wreck and ruin, she's gone on to do some amazing things, and raise three radical boys. And a year and a half ago she drove to NJ in the middle of the night when I had some, shall we say, personal issues. She was right there and knew what to say to me to get my thinking straight. But then, this is the same girl who put a hole in the upstairs bedroom drywall when we were practicing our breakdancing moves in the house in Petersburg. It was some sort of freestyle knee lift/push off that made a giant hole in the wall. She wanted me to take the blame for it, but eventually Linda made us come to an agreement that we wouldn't tell our Mom where the hole in the hall came from, and we knew then our breakdancing dreams would never be realized. But we had other dreams, and we lived them.

And, it seems to me, that for the first time in a long time my sister is emerging from the murky black cloud and feels new again, and in that spirit I propose a new Year One, a new beginning and challenges that seem trifling compared to past victories. The years that have passed have taken with them the unfaceable challenges and overcomeable odds and she has arrived at a place where she can be her own woman. And I am really freaking happy for her. No more fishhooks or piledrivers or concussions (that's not a funny story though, the concussion one), no more near death experiences, that shit's so passe.

Happy birthday to my stupid sister Linda. I guess I could have sent you an anatomically correct female reproductive organ model from a medical supply house, but this just seems more personal.