Ridiculous Opinions #191
I sent this to my sister a while ago when she took care of some business for my mom.
Many of you may or may not know that I have an older sister. I actually have four older siblings: Two brothers, one sister, and a brother that I didn’t know I had until I was sixteen. All have their merits (Hi, Mike!), but today’s post is about my sister, Lisa, who is six years older than me.
Lisa and I had somewhat of a rocky relationship when I was younger.
See that picture? The reality was that my sister wanted to replace the cake with my head. That look of glee on her face was her imagining that she was about to drive that fork into me so that it would end all of her troubles and allow her to function normally in her awesome 1970s overalls.
If I think back to these times, I remember torture. Not figurative torture…literal torture. Some days, my sister would get bored (we lived on a farm, so there wasn’t much for a teenage girl to do) and on those days, I was a target of her bored frustrations. We would be sitting in the living room, where I would happily be playing with my action figures, when she would say, “Hey, Randy…do you know what time it is?”
At the mere utterance of this phrase, I would burst out in a dead sprint, desperate to get away, because I knew what the next words out of her mouth would be…
“…it’s tickle-tickle time.”
No matter how fast I ran, no matter where I tried to hide, she would find me, whereupon she would wrestle me to the ground, pin my arms above my head and tickle me until I was on the verge of peeing my pants.
Worse still was when she would grab me, wrestle me to the ground, and dangle loogies above my gagging face, sucking them back up in the nick of time (though she occasionally failed at that). She was thirteen-years old. I was seven. It’s was normal, human behavior.
I planned my revenge, though. I knew that as soon as I was old enough, I would do the same thing to her. One day, when I had grown a sizable amount, I attempted this. It was the only time I tried it, because when I had her cornered, she narrowed her eyes and looked at me with a lifeless, sociopathic gaze and said, “If you touch me, I swear to God, I’ll kill you.”
I knew that she meant it. She would have killed me in the most unpleasant of ways. I never touched her. We reached a detente at that point.
But I’m not here to talk about the childhood trauma that my sister inflicted on me when I was younger. It’s been forty-something years since those awful times. The truth of the matter is that my sister has been one of the driving forces behind everything good that has happened to me in my life.
When I left university, I was desperate and depressed, not knowing what I wanted to do and not seeing any future for myself. She helped me get my start in Arizona.
She used to call me often at 3 AM from China to try to convince me to come work there. Eventually, she got me an interview and I moved to Shanghai. That’s where my life changed dramatically. I would not have met Tracey had that not happened. I would not have my two lovely daughters. Things would have been vastly different for me.
I owe it to her.
And though we have not gotten along perfectly in the past, we have a better relationship today than we have ever had. I attribute this to pickelball, because that has forced her to reevaluate her life and come to terms with who she is. Pickelball has forced her to reexamine the torture that she put me through when I was younger. Each slap of the paddle against the ball reminds her of the slap she used to make against my ass for absolutely no reason other than when I was walking through the room. Now, she can take out all of her aggression against her opponents, instead of taking out her aggression on her cute, lovable, little brother, whose only crime was being in the same room as her when she was in a bad mood.
Torture, I tell you.
So, I salute my older sister on this fine, spring break morning! May I continue to reap rewards from leeching off of the opportunities that she presents!
