A Tale of Two Sisters
Silver Linings in the Time of Coronavirus
This morning I woke up to find animal crackers in my soup. No, this is not what my pandemic pantry has reduced me to, although some of my culinary experiments come close! Let me explain.
Every day my sister and I exchange YouTube videos — at least one, but often it escalates. What I initiated in the subject line as “Vitamin YouTube” (back on February 24), was a link to Janis Joplin in a 1969 duet with Tom Jones, the two of them belting out “Raise Your Hand.” This performance beamed us right out of the winter’s funk (still forming in ways we couldn’t begin to imagine). I followed up over the next week with Bessie Smith, The Beatles, Paul Barton’s “Moonlight Sonata” for Old Elephant, and Rufus Thomas at Wattstax, but mostly centered on our favorite divas: Janis, Aretha, Billie, Tina, and Nina.
Then Dianne returned the lobbying serve. Now we were tap dancing! Sure, there were the usual suspects, but a dip into Fred and Cyd would often segue into something surreal, like a 1983 clip of Steve Martin and Gregory Hines. I discovered that her favorite dancer was Donald O’Connor, while I had a secret affinity for Buddy Ebsen. But who can deny the adorable Shirley Temple? Or the genius of the Nicholas Brothers? Going down that Hollywood rabbit hole was sheer joy, and when I mentioned in a casual note that I’d love to read a bio of them, one appeared in my mailbox a week later.
Instinctively Dianne and I seemed to know (or would soon discover) that we have a lot in common. This was not always evident while growing up. I am three years older (soon to be 67, while she is just shy of being an official senior citizen). It’s nothing now, but a huge gap when you are growing up in a family that is already emotionally fractured by the loss of a parent. My sister and I had different temperaments, different bone sizes, different talents, and different frames of reference (until we sat down in front of the TV to watch “I Love Lucy.”) We also had different memories of our father. I had some, and she had none.
After elementary school, we never shared the same friends or hallways, due to that daunting age gap and the structure of junior and senior high. Besides, I was too busy planning my escape at age eighteen, with no quality time to share with my sister. She would relocate when our mother remarried, and have to navigate her senior year in a strange new setting. It couldn’t have been easy. Meanwhile, I was dealing with my own trials and tribulations in New York City, an art student trying to adapt to the fantasy scenario of my own future.
Fast forward to now. In early February I was planning to visit my mom and my sister. Our stepfather had died just a year before, and my mother was a widow again. Meanwhile, Dianne had been diagnosed with colon cancer. I wanted to step up to the plate after all these years — to help out as much as she wanted me to, as much as I could, and just be there for the both of them. I would drive her to chemo treatments, walk her dog, buy her groceries, watch movies with her, and make her healthy drinks with ginger and turmeric. I would leave when she was sick of me. Hopefully, I would be the older sister she deserved all these years.
Then came the coronavirus lockdown. My family — we three (actually, four! Dianne has a daughter, my niece Delaney, who is studying for her doctorate out in Kansas) — are now all separated, all single women, and, I am finding out, all very strong. We all have each others’ backs. And we see, and seize, the silver lining in the dark clouds rumbling overhead.
Sometimes I lie awake during this “new normal,” thinking about which YouTube video I’ll send Dianne the next morning. I’ve already sent her “Here Comes the Sun.” She’s already sent me “Get Happy.” We can always happily settle on more tap dancing. Shuffle, hop, step over, Nicholas Brothers, the Watts Sisters are waiting in the wings.
