in the beginning...

...of course I don't remember this. I am the infant. The almost 9 year old, my sister Barbara. The year is 1953. What I like most about this photo is that my sister looks so happy. Proof that someone was happy about my arrival-- parents are almost always happy about a new baby, even if they (or at least my mother) had hoped for a boy. 3 times. But for the child who has just been displaced as the youngest, and therefore the most likely center of attention, my sister Barbara looks genuinely thrilled to have a new little sister. And that's how I always knew her to be; never grabbing the spotlight for herself, almost embarrassed by the attention her beauty attracted, and very much taken with babies. She was what we would today describe as a "girly-girl"; loving dresses and dolls, having tea parties for her doll-friends, and cutting paper dolls from the Sears Catalog. One of my earliest memories is of Barbara setting up the paper doll house on her bed. The furniture was cut from the catalog, the rooms were defined by belts from our mother's closet. The large, well-dressed family came from the catalog pages where they modeled clothing. There were appliances, toys, and family pets, all in black and white, wobbling on the chenille bedspread. And there were horses, always horses. Cut from coloring books and carefully decorated with crayons, horses galloped and reared in their belt-made barns and pastures. I loved watching my sisters unpack the paper family and its furnishings from their shoebox, sliding the children into their beds through the slit cut where the paper pillows met the paper bedspread. I was repeatedly instructed by my sisters (Becky would play too, if Barbara let her have first pick when choosing family members from the box) to watch, but don't touch. There came a time when Becky was not at home to play, or perhaps felt she was getting too old for paper dolls. Out of desperation, Barbara allowed me to play paper dolls with her. I was given a few family members; a mother missing an arm where she had been separated from her husband by the scissors, a boy looking back over his shoulder at the hip pockets of his jeans, a baby, grotesquely large-scale and permanently sleeping. I was patiently reminded several times not to touch her dolls or house. It must have been all too tempting for me because I remember Barbara dragging our mother by the hand into the bedroom, where apparently I had committed a crime. Our mother listened patiently while her middle daughter produced exhibits A, B, and C: paper people, crumpled by tiny hands. Trying to sympathize, and to hide her smile, my mother suggested that I be given additional family members and furnishings, and belts to make a house. Exasperated, but obedient, my sister shared a few of her treasures, then packed the rest into the shoebox and put it up too high for me to reach. I can't remember seeing her play paper dolls after that; a couple of years later she gave me the coveted shoebox. It wasn't the same, though. My houses were never as cleverly designed as hers, my paper families were never as beautiful, their furnishings were never as flat and unwrinkled. I wasn't even able to cut new dolls from the catalog with the careful precision of my sister. I kept trying though, because I wanted to be just like the most clever, fun, most perfect person I knew, and the best paper doll cutter in the world; I wanted to be just like Barbara, my big sister.