Sia

The clearest memory I have of my sister, Sia, is that time when she dumped a plate of food on my head for no reason.

I remember I must have been about eleven, which would make her 13 at the time. I remember the meal. It was ackee and saltfish and rice. When my mom makes ackee and saltfish, she sautee's it with bits of tomato, onion and pepper, and I clearly remember each one of these bits dripping off my ears onto my shoulders while my sister smiled. I clearly remember that smile too. It wasn't as much evil, as it was... interested, curious and maybe a touch satisfied. It's the same look I imagine a first time bungee-jumper has after his or her first leap from the precipice.

If you can infer a line of thinking from a smile, it seems to me the first-time bungee jumper is thinking: Wow! I've crossed a major boundary. And you know what? That wasn't so bad. If possible I could do that again, and again.... and again...

I remember the feeling I had at the time too, which is a perfect summary of what it's like to live with my sister. I was embarrassed but I was also angry, not so much because of what Sia did, but because from that moment on I knew that with my sister, anything was possible. There were no more limits, no zone of safety where you could say to yourself: "If I act in this manner, its pretty much guaranteed that I won't get a plate of foot tossed onto my head." Thus I was rendered helpless because I could not retaliate, for fear of even more strange, painful and unguessable consequences.

For me and my younger brother, living with Sia was living with Mary Poppins crossed with a pit bull. As the oldest sibling, she was loving, protective and stern which was alright, but you never ever knew when she was going to turn around and bite you on your ass.

* * *

I get the impression that Sia might often have been dissapointed with being saddled with two brother's like myself and N'gai. For the most part we were totally unremarkable. Our only interests were food, comic books, and spending vast amounts of time away from our sister. Sia always was trying to make us more interesting that we really were, just so she could brag about it to her friends. Invariably, it backfired.

I remember once, around the same time Thriller came out, so I might have been 8 or 9, Sia bragged to all her friends that N'gai and I could do the moonwalk. Since the Thriller album was not released in comic book format, we really didn't know what a moonwalk was. But since Sia had such apparent faith in us, especially in front of an audience of all her friends, we decided to give it a game try. N'gai and I ended up performing what I thought was a fairly faithful adaption of a moon walk, a la Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin's low-gravity, un-rhythmic duck-walk across the surface of earth's natural satellite. Neither Sia or her friends were impressed. Sia, N'gai and I were embarrassed, but only Sia was aware of it at the time, because we were still engrossed with jumping around like ant-bitten asses. I'm sure that was the first of many incidents leading to the "dumping-food-on-my-head" incident...

* * *

When Sia's first child was born (let's call him "Jay"), he was really... really... pre-mature. He was very small (I could have cradled him in one palm), and very, very red. It was a painful and difficult birth, and when I visited Sia, she looked very tired, but she was happy to see me. By this time, I could sense that she was tired of awkward, stilting conversations with people trying to either prepare her for, or keep her away from bad news. So we talked very plainly, she and I, and we laughed a lot. My siblings and I share a very dark sense of humor, and tend to prefer laughing, rather than crying in the face of tough life situations. She cracked me up with the story of how Jay would often get so pissed off at the constant ministrations of the nurses that he would often pull out his own oxygen tube, as if to say: "For god's sake, ladies! Leave me the hell alone for five minutes!" It was then I knew that Jay was going to be more or less okay. He was a survivor. Not only did he have the intestinal fortitude and physical strength to pull out his own oxygen tube, he had Sia's sense of spite, and with that, how could you not be a survivor?

* * *

Sia has two kids now. Jay is about six years old, and a girl whom we shall call "Kay" is three. Kay looks a lot like Sia, right down to the "don't-mess-with-me" glint in her eyes. I enjoy calling their house phone, because with two energetic kids, Sia doesn't greet you with a mere "hello" like normal people. Often she'll pick up the phone in mid-rant, so before she even speaks into the receiver you'll hear her yelling at the top of her lungs something like:

"I told you to stop jumping off the television set! Aaaarghhh, you kids are going to drive me crazy!"

Then she'll speak into the phone with an "Hello? Who's this?", and the tone of her voice is so tired, angry, exasperated and pleading for respite that I begin to smile a very evil smile. You see, the very night she dumped that plate of food on my head, I prayed to God and asked him to give her children exactly like herself.

And you see folks: prayer works!