SISTER

 

Time, reckoning with myself. Too many memories, and thoughts, contemplation and self-reflection are not always helpful, can be too much to take on, especially when you always thought you had plenty of time to do that and suddenly you don't. Maybe I was the last person to talk, have conversation of sorts, with Gina, in the Bay Med ER before they ran me out so they could prep her for the helicopter flight to Pensacola, sedated, then at the hospital put in a medically induced coma. But in the ER she was conscious and responsive, both with squeezing fingers and with complaining about pain, saying "it hurts to breathe", and she said "I'm so cold" and the nurse brought a blanket. 

She was my sister for 83 years and counting, With DD, our aunt Mildred, our mother's sister, I knew Gina not at all best, but first and longer than anyone. Gina died today, and one of the strangest things I've ever faced is having to think, type, say, "Gina was ...". 

Years ago, when my Kristen was a little girl, Kristen adopted a "show up on the porch" feral cat, a little more than still a kitten, lanky, awkward "adolescent" stage, skittish. The cat turned out mean, biting and not playfully, scratching, mostly teeth and claws, we couldn't let her keep it. At the time, we were still living in Apalachicola, and Linda took the cat, in a cat carrier, from home in Panama City, to Apalachicola. I was on the porch here, holding Kristen's hand as Linda drove away. As we watched the car disappear, Kristen said brokenheartedly, "Now I don't have a kitty". Today I know how it must have been for a little girl. Me, a very old man, now I don't have a sister.

Friend, Panama City pioneer family, whose parents owned and lived in The Old Place for a time back in the nineteen-forties when it was out of my family, Mike McKenzie sent me the picture of Gina from the Bay High annual for her graduating class of 1956. Walt was a year behind her, a junior at Bay High that year, I was a junior at Univ Florida in Gainesville. I had played, and those two were playing in Mr. Whitley's Bay High Million Dollar Band, raking in Superior ratings at band festivals around the state. Gina was active on the extracurricular scene. Unlike me, I was in Latin Club one year, Senior Band 11 and 12; and in the Key Club so I could walk downtown to the Dixie-Sherman and have a free lunch with the Kiwanis Club in the mezzanine dining room once a week because none of the other Key Club members wanted to bother, and I liked the parker house rolls and pat of real butter. But Gina was a pistol from day one. As a tiny toddler she would climb out of her crib at night and show up at our parents' bedside, angering our father. I don't think it ever bothered her to aggravate him.

Starting that fall of 1956, while Walt was a senior still playing in the Bay High Band and in love with Judy, and I was a senior at Florida, Gina would embark on a varied college career that began at Brenau College in Georgia, continued at Florida for a year or so, then finished successfully at FSU with a bachelors degree and then a masters degree in speech therapy. She was our smart one. Always had the best grades, but always struggling to break out of the middle place in our "family of origin".

And the tongue, the mouth. Gina was a character. In fact, today a family belovedy remembered and characterized Gina as "a spitfire", which for my years with her, all her life from birth to death, nailed it, totally nailed it. 

In our growing up years, Gina was the sassy one, always arguing and "talking back", contending with our mother all their frustrating lives together. While my brother and I tried to toe his line, Gina the Gutsy One suffered no crap gladly from our father, sassily returning better than he dished out. I can see his face darkening. We were not always a peaceful household: maybe yours was not either.

At Cove School, Gina loved, and was loved by, the teacher most feared by the rest of us, Miss Ruth Martin, who terrified not only us students but also, as I found out long decades later, other teachers as well. Of grim countenance in classroom and on playground, Miss Martin terrorized me through my third grade year and, to my horror, was sitting at the teacher's desk skip-a-year later when summer vacation ended the Tuesday after Labor Day 1945, and I showed up for first day of fifth grade. OMG. 

And school wasn't the limit of it, Miss Martin and her brother Will and sisters were parishioners, and Ruth and her sisters, and one sister's family, were active members of our church, St Andrew's Episcopal, and friends with our grandparents from long years. I feared her, Gina loved her.

Okay, I'm rambling, so what, it's my blog. Only I would remember this, and only Linda knows it because I've told her, one of my Gina stories. I don't think Walt was standing there, or maybe he was; and Gina would long have forgot because she won that Time, but I remember because I definitely lost that one. Thinking of the car we arrived in, it must have been late 1947, some months after our grandmother died. I would have been eleven or twelve, so Gina nine years old. Thereabouts, close enough. We were in the kitchen at our grandfather's house in St Andrews, while mama visiting with Marguerite, our father's youngest sister who, after Mom's death the previous January, had moved in with her children to look after Pop. Mama and Marguerite's visit was ending, I could hear mama in the front room getting up and collecting her things to leave. Tension in the kitchen, Gina said or did something, I criticized her, and she said angrily, "Damn you", a word forbidden in our household. Shocked at her swearing, I stared at her and, incomprehensibly stupidly as it turned out, said, "I'm gonna tell mama you said Damn". Whereupon Gina raced past me into the next room, confronting our mother as she headed our way, and said, "Mama, Bubba said Damn". I didn't have a chance. Mama stormed into the kitchen where I was, grabbed me, and slapped me in the face, slap, slap, slapped the hell out of me. When she let go of me, with bright red, stinging cheeks, I glared at Gina, who snickered, laughed. Chalk one up, Sister.

Generally though, while the Gang of Two were up to something, I the oldest was the good one, the loving, obedient son. Help in the yard. Come home from school and dig azalea beds. Work at the fish house, shovel the accumulated ice away from the ice machine (after shaking the monster spiders out of my high rubber boots) every Sunday after church, feed Happy the dog, and the cat who from cat to cat was always just Here, Kitty, a cat doesn't need a name, ignores you when called anyway. Give Happy fresh water, put out the garbage, help with the dishes, mix the fruitcake batter before Christmas, stir the candy batter before Thanksgiving. A regular Jacob, who loved his mother dearly and didn't hide it, and through our lives, mama made no secret that she favored me, sometimes even acknowledged it when Gina and mama were at odds. 

For a while, Gina owned and drove a new, light blue 1960 Ford convertible, one of the best looking Fords of our Time

There are other stories, family secrets I will never tell that now only Walt and I may know, this is my last story and done. That Gina, now and then, in jealous sobbing anger at me because I'd won one, through her tears of rage would shout at me, "PET, PET, PET". 

I am so sorry we had those times and years, and that I as the oldest nearly always came out ahead. When I graduated Bay High, turned eighteen, went away to college, and in my mind established my independence, I never again returned home as "one of the children" but in my mind, only a visitor biding my Time.

No, I'll tell this one more. No I won't. Looking back on our childhood, it seems like Gina always saw herself in competition with me, competition that I did not feel, never felt, but she must have felt, apparently did feel, and, competing, would always out shine me, always had better grades at school, always outdid me. But at school and elsewhere she always complained about being compared to "your brother Carroll". Being the oldest child is a spot that can be envied but not won, and I would not wish being the Middle Child on anyone. The pressure to be noticed and feel equally loved must be unbearable.

We did better as adults. Now and then, especially after I gave up the Navy and relaxed into being just a parish priest, Gina would telephone me with a mothering problem or a question. When Linda and I and Malinda and Joe returned to Florida in July 1966 after three years in Japan, me a Navy lieutenant commander focused on career and paying scant attention to family of origin any more, Gina was a teacher, married, with two little children, a one year old nearly toddling, and a newborn infant. We visited them at their home over near Pensacola on our drive toward Panama City, but never lived close and only saw each other when we were home on Navy leave at Christmas or summertime. I think we both worked hard to make everything alright between us, and I believe we made a fair job of it, closer and more mutually trusting and respectful of each other as maturing adults than ever as children. 

Gina did kind things for me. Cooked and invited me to meals of favorite dishes. Baked oysters. Wrote me up to receive history type awards, memberships and honors. Prepared thick, detailed notebooks of family ancestry and history. Nearly eleven years ago when I returned home, a recuperator from open heart surgery at Cleveland Clinic, Gina was the first one over, with a sack of oysters to welcome me home. I remember conversations and confidences. In our later years, to me, Gina was eccentric with conversation, talking on and on about things and people she seemed to think I knew as she did, and I had no idea what or who she was talking about. 

Gina was the family genealogist and historian. She loved tracking down distant relatives whom I would never have had the courage to knock on their doors expecting to be greeted warmly, and she pulled it off. Again, she would talk for hours naming relatives I never heard of, mentioning only their first names and the first names of their children and grandchildren, and I had no idea who she was talking about and she went rapidly on before I could stop her and ask. 

Walt will have his own memories and stories, so I guess this is about my memories of life with Gina. But more than anything, she incredibly loved her grandchildren, devoted many years and boundless love and miles of happy travel to her Thompson grandsons and, I believe, they to her. She was a trip, and often a puzzle.

Life is a risk, and Gina took it. In two marriages and two divorces, with unbridled tongue and independent mind and strong will, raising her four children, teaching school, settling back home in Panama City, buying her home, and later selling it to buy an RV, a motorhome that was her mansion on wheels. 

My sister was a living story who turned life into a living, moving, on the go adventure, touring cemeteries, digging up facts, making new relatives faster than anyone I know makes new friends. A week ago, Gina rolled her RV and suffered injuries that brought about her death. I'm here alive, writing this evening of the day the plug was pulled and she died. Now I don't have a sister. 

At eighty-six, I will never get used to saying or writing "Gina was". But in this creation, Time only moves in one direction, and Life only goes forward, never backward. 

Glancing back over this wandering ramble, I'll be damned if I'm going to go back over it and edit it to make it perfect.

Why do I feel that Gina had the last word after all - - won this one, leaving me here nonplussed yet not at all surprised.

Bubba