Posted by Jai Narayan on January 16, 2004, at 8:22:43
when I was 16
I remember a hot humid summer day while mom was in the thick of another nervous breakdown.
My sister Terry, who is eight years older than me, and her husband Jed were visiting from Chicago.
Mom and Jed had my sister Pam, who is only 19 months older than me, in the dinning room with the doors closed. I could hear her plaintive voice trying to placate their questions. I was standing in the kitchen on the other side of one of the doors listening."What is going on in there?" I asked Terry who was doing her laundry and folding a white tee shirt.
"Don’t worry about it, she needs this to help her figure our her life, it’s good for her," she said.
"What are they doing?" I asked as I burst through the door.
The first thing I saw was Pam sitting at the end of the dinning room table with a panicked look on her face. Jed was looming over her and mother was leaning towards her from an adjacent chair.
"What are you going to do with the rest of your life!" Jed demanded as the gin and tonic with a twist of lime in his right hand spilled on the oriental rug .
"Is this necessary?" I asked peering deep into moms’ vacant bloodshot eyes.
"Pam you don’t have to stay here, " I said.
She bolted form the chair and as the kitchen door swung shut I turned to face the two.
"I am totally disgusted with you both."
I propped open the kitchen door and briskly walked through the room past Terry, who was standing there with her mouth open, through the back door while searching for a sign of Pam.
She had disappeared.I spotted Dad in the backyard organizing the garbage.
"Dad, Pam is really upset and she bolted out of the back door, did you see her?" He shook his head.
I ran around to the front porch where mom was leaning on the white pillar and was dramatically raking her hair back with her left hand.
"Have you seen Pam?""Honey, don’t worry about her, she’ll be fine," mom said in a dreamy voice as she gazed up at the impending storm gathering in the sky.
I ran back to Dad and demanded we find Pam. We jumped into the powder blue Ford and drove around the town as I explained the incident that lead to this problem, finally we stopped at Dads’ office where we found her on the front stoop sobbing.
She ran into dad arms.
"I know you’re hurt, I’m so sorry," he said in a soothing voice.I felt so much love for them both but especially for dad.
poster:Jai Narayan
thread:301535
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/write/20040102/msgs/301535.html