Question Number Two

2. How many brothers and sisters do you have? What are their names and birthdates? What do you remember about them from growing up?

There are four of us siblings in my family. I have an older sister, an older brother and a younger brother. My mom had a miscarriage between myself and my younger brother. She told me she was about 5 months pregnant when she miscarried. I never discussed this with my mother, but I think it's interesting that my four children were born in the same pattern as my siblings and I. My firstborn is a girl, my second is a boy, my third is a girl, then I had a miscarriage, and my youngest is a boy. Of course they're all grown up now.

My siblings and I were all named with "S" names. My sister is Sarah, my older brother is Scott, and my younger brother is Seth. We had a babysitter who occasionally struggled with our names. She tripped over our first names because they began with the same letter. It was like a tongue-twister. And then there was the barber who could never remember my little brother's name. He called him "Sid" or "Stu".

We were all children of the 50's except for Seth. Seth's age is the easiest for me to remember. All I have to do is add the decades. (Or subtract four from my age, which is shorter.)

I shared a room with Sarah for a couple of years when I was 6 or 7. She would make up bedtime stories to get me to go to sleep after the lights were turned out. My favorite was about Moosely and Chumley, a moose and a squirrel who were friends and lived together. (I detected a strong Bullwinkle influence.) Everything about the town they lived in had the word "moose" in it. For example, they would go shopping for groceries at the Supermooseket. I would get the giggles and I don't think it helped me go to sleep much. I used to beg her to tell them again. Not long after, I moved in to a room with my little brother, and we shared a room for about 5 or 6 years. I remember trying to tell him bedtime stories, but nothing topped Moosely and Chumley.

My brother Scott had amazing timing as a child. When I was four years old, my family moved from the Midwest to California. We drove all the way in a station wagon with my baby brother in a bassinet. When we stopped at one of several toll booths along the way, the man in the booth commented on Seth who was sound asleep. He teased Scott by asking, "Can I have your baby brother?" to which Scott replied: "No, but you can have my little sister." Ba-dum-bum.

I was very impressed with Scott because he knew the Cuban Peanut Vendor song: "In Cuba, every merry maid/Wakes up to this serenade: "Pea-nuts" (bum-ba-dum-ba-dum)/"Pea-nuts" (bum-ba-dum-ba-dum)/If there's no ending to this song/A million monkeys can't go wrong."  That kind of talent can't be learned. You either have it or you don't.

Music was always a big part of our lives when we were kids. One time Sarah and Scott took a big empty appliance box and decorated the outside to look like a jukebox. They cut a little slot for coins, then put me inside and told me to sing "Blue Moon". First they had to teach me the song. Every good jukebox should know their songs.

My little brother Seth and I spent most of our childhood together, whether it was riding in the way-back of the family's station wagons, watching Saturday morning cartoons, or sharing bunk beds. When I was 10, the neighborhood kids got together and put on a couple of extremely amateur "theatrical" plays in our garage. (Very off-off-off Broadway.) We wrote the plays, made the costumes, and our parents even let us hang curtains so we could change scenes. The first play had a Frankenstein's monster theme, and the second play revolved around a day in the life of the Peanuts cartoon characters, which were hugely popular then. We put black paper spots on Seth's footy pajamas and sat him on a card table for a dog house. He gave a stellar performance as Snoopy. That kid could emote.