Siblings

[No date noted.]

My sister was on the phone. She is a little older than me and, like most people, still retains childhood jealousies when anything good happens to a younger sibling.

"Saw your picture in the paper," she said, trying to sound disinterested.

Scan of Jim's column headline, circa 1990

"Yes, what did you think of it?" I asked.

"You're looking older, more gray in your hair." She paused. "More wrinkles. And you're putting on weight. How much did you pay them?"

"I didn't pay them anything," I protested. "The paper asked me for the picture, said they wanted to see what I looked like. Is that so hard to believe?"

She ignored my question. "I have to admit when I first saw your picture, I thought you had been arrested and I was glad Daddy is not alive to see it. You know what a law and order man he was, it would have broke his heart."  She hardly stopped for breath. "I bet you didn't read any other story that was in the paper. I bet you just sat and looked at your picture all week."

"I did too read some other stories in the paper. There was a story on the front page about a mussel diver who said he contacted a body while working in 22 feet of water in Kentucky Lake, but then he lost it, then he found it again. But couldn't bring it to the surface."

The thought occurred to me that the body could have been that of our kinswoman, Mary Parker, who escaped from her grave at Mt. Zion Cemetery some months before. Mary had lived down near Harmon's Creek. Maybe that high ground at Mt. Zion was just too dry for Mary and she decided to go swimming.

"Don't go making jokes about a dead person." She sounded pained. "So you read the front page and nothing else?"

"Sure!! I saw the pictures of all the high school graduating kids. A lot of names sounded familiar, I probably know most of the fathers and grandfathers. And that's not all, in the "Liberty News," Andrea Madden wrote about a preacher who had hit the happy trail because he wasn't being paid enough.  In her "Chalk Hill" column, Nell Morrisette mentioned a lady from Ooltewah, Tennessee. That sent me scuttling for my atlas. I never heard of that town before. Sure enough! There it was, in the Southeast corner of the state, a few miles east of Chattanooga. And there are only two people in the obituary section this week, which is a considerable improvement over the last issue."

My sister seemed not to have heard. "I hope," she grunted, "if they print your picture again, they do it in color - not black and white - so the wrinkles will stand out more."

I Have A Daughter

[Editor's note: For years a clipping of this article hung on the wall of my office at Bozell Worldwide, an advertising agency in New York. I wish I had noted the publication date.]

original date published: unknown

The "daughter" of the article, age 3,
displaying an early love of shoes 

I have a daughter living in New York City who is a lot like her father. Contentious, contrary, argumentative, and prone to the last word. But she will never bore you, be dull company or cause you to wonder where she stands on an issue.

On the phone the other day she complained, "Dad, you write about my Mother, my Grandfather, you even write about a dog, but you don't mention me."

It is hard to write about the people one is close to and the closer the relationship, the harder it is to write. If I tried to describe her good points as well as her not so endearing traits, anything I would say would be tinged with prejudice. I can say she was never a problem growing up but that she was troublesome in that after the sixth grade, she felt the bathroom in our house was her private territory and no one else should use it without her permission. With that thought in mind, she stocked the bathroom with dozens of bottles of hair shampoo, hair tints, and hair curling solutions. She had concoctions for light hair, dark hair and hair that was thicker than normal. Taking the place that my shaving gear had occupied in the early year of my marriage was a dozen or more bottles of fingernail polish. Four or five tints of red alone. 

She could be followed through the house by the trail of shoes she left in her wake. She loved shoes and owned many pairs but seldom had them on her feet. When she arrived home from school, she kicked off the shoes she was wearing in the living room and continued on to her bedroom where she would try on three pairs, kick two pairs off on the floor of the room, then wear the third pair to the bathroom where she would add them to the collection of her things adorning the floor there.

When she was thirteen, she ran away from home but didn't stay long. Within two or three hours hunger and forgetting what she was mad about drove her back to our door. She was a good student, hard working and dependable, earning mostly Bs. After high school, she completed a five year course in Library Science in just four years. Hard work and dedication made that possible. She had no natural talent in that direction. Immediately after college, she set off for New York to make her mark in show business. But in the world of show biz, for every successful one there are literally millions who fall by the wayside. She has had to come to grips with the real world. And she has adapted pretty well. She claims the title of account executive with an advertising company. I fret about her all alone in that big town, but she seems to be doing well and I am proud. 

I'm glad to have our bathroom back unencumbered with shoes and bottles. But on the days I'm searching through the house for shampoo, I feel a tinge of longing for the good old days.