Missing my Little Cherubs

I can't decide whether it's paradoxical or it makes perfect sense that I'll be utilizing my blog a ton more now that I'm on hiatus from Facebook.  More use makes sense, of course, but I'll have like 1/64th the amount of views since most of them came from Facebook.  I like attention and I like when people listen to what I happen to have to say (aka, when my statuses got liked on Facebook), which is why I like the silliness of Twitter.  I got 45 followers, yo.  Thing is, I'm a Dickens, not a Hemingway.  Y'all know that.  160 characters is hardly enough to hashtag a tweet, never mind compose a complete thought.  So I'll be taking to blogging to fulfill my personal attention-hog needs.  I approximate that this post will get about 17 views since it'll get tweeted about and not plastered all over Facebook.  Thanks you guyssssss.

I adore all of my classes this semester, despite all the hours of homework I'm unaccustomed to putting in.  My favorite is probably the one least relevant to my major- my Social Fact from Fiction Honors Seminar.  We read roughly a book a week, each of which is a fictional work that says something very factual about various social problems we face in society.  We're currently reading Black and Blue, by Anna Quindlen.  The title is a clever play on two things: bruises from domestic violence and her husband's position as a police officer.  It's got a compelling plot and makes you feel very real sympathy for the plight of Fran, our protagonist.  I'm just about through with it, but I'm not here to summarize or sell it to you.  I just want to talk about the characterization.

There are two characters in the novel hit close to home for me.  So close to home, in fact, that it was painful to read at moments.  One is Fran's sister, Gracie, and one is her son, Robert.  With Grace, it's the relationship of the sisters that brings me immediately to mine with Delia, while it's the actual character of Robert that brings Ewok to mind.  I actually post-it noted a few passages.  "Direct conversation had never been the way to engage [Eric]; I always had to wait through the silences for his words to swim up at me."  I saw, like a third person omniscient narrator might, myself sitting at the kitchen table, perhaps home from school on a break, watching Eric eat two Oreos with a glass of milk, reading the comics page (The Peanuts Gang first).  I could ask him a thousand questions--"How was school?  Learn anything interesting?  How's Mr. Specht doing?  What are you playing in orchestra?  Do you have hockey tonight?  How's [insert crush's name here]?"--and he'd answer in a quarter as many words--"Good.  Yeah.  He was okay.  The same pieces you played.  Yeah. I don't talk to her."  It wasn't until I bit my tongue and sat patiently that the good stuff would come out--"Oh!  Guess what Nick and Kyle and I decided at lunch about our mini-hockey team!"  And then I'd hear all the necessary updates on the Nebraska Knights, for which their friend Tom was Captain.  

Showing me via Skype
that they can dance

Or maybe a commercial would come on and remind Eric of a thought he had.  He'd ask a question about music and I'd launch happily into an hour-long explanation of chords and chord progressions and lead sheets, shocking Eric with the news that notation exists beyond sheet music.  Just like Fran's son in the story.  Maybe all teenage boys are like that.  Regardless, Fran's son also has the same birthday as Ewok does.  I was going to rhetorically ask what the odds of that are, but my Stats class last semester definitely taught me how to figure it out.  The odds are precisely 1/365.  

The relationship between Fran and her little sister Gracie is my favorite thing about this book.  The closeness of the sisters was established early on and referenced often enough so you never forgot it.  "If only I could talk to my sister, the way I had in the half-light of our bedroom when we were girls, the street lamps shining in a divot of yellow across our twin beds.  If only I could talk to [Delia] the way I did when we were younger, lying in the darkness listening to her questions, answering them as best I could."  There are dozens of lines in the book that sound like this.  Like the author had seen some picture of Delia and me giggling across the room to each other in hushed tones when Mom thought we were asleep.  No such picture exists, of course.  There is absolutely no evidence of the late-night chats that left us with dark circles under our eyes.  We were excellent at feigning sleep.  Mom totally never had a clue (Read as: Mom totally let us have our fun because she was glad we didn't fight).  

Infamous SISTERS Face

If I went to bed later than Delia did--being three years older, I deserved a later bed time--she waited up for me.  We shared a room for ten years and did this every night.  I cried when I spent the first night in my own room at the age of 15.  We got over it, but we've always had this unspoken agreement of saying good night since then.  That meant that one of us would go to the other's room and we'd say all the things and ask all the questions and show all the texts and share all the gossip we hadn't had a chance to during the day.  Usually it was in my room, since I always went to bed later, plus we wouldn't wake anyone up laughing from downstairs.  Even now, five years later, it's still the tradition when I'm home from school.  We've both fallen asleep on my bed, waking up confused in the middle of the night.  

Well anyway, Grace was what Fran missed most when she moved across the country under a new name to escape her abusive husband.  Fran referenced those good times with her sister frequently.  One such tradition was calling each other to trade horror stories after Thanksgiving dinner.  It wasn't until months after Fran and her son settled in that new town with their new names that she picked up the phone and called her sister after Thanksgiving dinner.  For four straight pages I sobbed with Frannie and Gracie.  In a happy story, you cry for the sad parts.  In a sad story, you cry for the happy ones.  



In retrospect, the lines that reminded me of Delia and Eric were less convincing than I remembered them being.  There are definite parallels, but no one else would have noticed.  It just goes to show that I see Delia and Eric everywhere I look.  I've said it before and I hope you believe me: I adore my siblings more than anything else in the world.  

You see the resemblance too, right?