The Man with the Golden Sugar Cone

As brash as our grandfather could be, and contrary to his outward appearance, Grandpa was one of the most gentle and kind men I have ever met. We lived in a very loud household, which probably was also why Grandpa always had headaches. Our grandmother, mother, Sam and I did not help. Between the four of us, we argued a lot. Though, whenever there was a blow out of yelling, no matter who was involved, you could bet that about fifteen minutes after everyone had calmed down Grandpa would sneak upstairs with his car keys in hand.

He would lean into our rooms (which we’d usually been banished to) and whisper in his deep, gruff voice, “I heard they have a new flavor of ice cream at Thrifty’s. Get your shoes.” And while we always knew there was no new flavor of ice cream, we’d hurry to grab our shoes and quietly creep down the stairs like we were super spies out of a James Bond movie.

He’d hold up the act of secrecy until we were in the car and on the road. Once in the car, usually only Sam would keep up conversation. She’d hum something to herself or tell Grandpa and me a story as he and I stayed quiet with a small smile on our lips in anticipation of the impending ice cream.

When we got there, it was always the same. Grandpa got two scoops of Rocky Road, Sam got a sugar cone of Mint Chip and I got one scoop of Rocky Road. Then we’d pile back into the car with our bounty and Sam still singing in the background . She really never stopped. She’d just keep going and going and going, but on super-secret ice cream trips it was hard to get irritated with her.

Grandpa would always drive around until we’d finished our ice cream so we could dump the evidence before we got home, so we spent a lot of time in the car as he and I both took forever to eat and Sam would have inhaled hers well before we had even made a dent into our icy mounds of chocolate and marshmallows.

After getting rid of empty cups, we’d usually run into a gas station bathroom to rinse off any remaining stickiness. In the early years of doing this, that part of the trip tended to take a little bit longer as Sam had a way of getting ice cream pretty much everywhere. There was even a trip that we had to stop and buy her a new shirt as she’d dropped an entire scoop down her front.

Once we were all cleaned up, we’d head home. This was one of the rare times Sam was quiet when she wasn’t sick. She knew as well as I did that we now had the challenge of creeping back upstairs and into our rooms without being discovered. Of course, now I know Mom and Grandma knew about these trips every time we went, but at the time Grandpa kept us under the belief that this was secret and special. So, we’d creep back inside and slowly crawl our ways back up the stairs and down the hall until slithering back into our respective rooms, pretending like no adventure had ever been had and not daring to even speak to our mother until we were sure the scent of chocolate was no longer on our breath.

“You’re Sisters!”

Our grandfather was a quiet man. A brilliant and quiet man. In his younger years he had dreamed of being a jazz trumpetist. He even graduated from Julliard. For those of you who don’t know, attending (let alone graduating from) Julliard is a big deal if you’re an aspiring musician.

He also played at Carnegie Hall multiple times. That’s a big deal too. In fact, Grandpa liked to flaunt that he had played at Carnegie Hall. It was always when I was getting frustrated playing my violin that it would come up.

He would walk into the den with a grumpy expression  and fold his arms as I struggled through scales. When I was on the verge of giving up he would speak in his gruff, baritone voice (that sounded like a mix of James Earl Jones and Clint Eastwood in one man), “Joanna Lynn Cleland, how do you get to Carnegie Hall?” He always used our middle names when he was trying to be serious.

I would roll my eyes before turning around and replying evenly, “Practice, practice, practice.”

Grandpa then would chuckle and mutter, “Good girl,” before letting me get back to my practicing with a small smile on his lips. I have heard that dumb joke over a million times and I will probably tell it a million times more.

Anyway, with having to support nine children and going to war in his early twenties, Grandpa’s dreams of music fell victim to the suffocating drone of reality. He was a door-to-door salesman for a while and eventually joined the navy. You see, my grandfather thought that he was going to join the navy and play in the navy band. He never dreamed that his ridiculous skill of perfect hearing would land him on a submarine as one of the top sonar guys of his time.

No, joke. My grandfather had such a good ear he learned to recognize the difference between the passing of a humpback whale’s song, a pack of dolphins romping by and the bay of an enemy sub looming in the depths beyond. He could hear everything.

Even in his elder years, he didn’t lose this skill. A pin dropped in the front hall of our two story home, and he heard it no matter where he was in the house. Not just heard it, but was irritated by it. Being great at hearing was a blessing and a curse for our grandfather. He was often stricken with headaches which only added to his grumpy outward demeanor.

For two little girls, this was a tough thing to deal with. Especially as two little girls that were sisters tended to fight. A lot.

I’m not talking the normal arguments of dissention. I’m talking about a war of vocal magnitude so loud that our neighbors a half block away could hear it. While in public I was a quiet child, but when it came to fighting with my sister I could scream with the best of them. Oh, how we yelled. It would be over the dumbest stuff too. Most of the time it was about what TV show we were watching. Our fights also went from grumpy whining to screeching at the tops of our lungs in seconds. There was very little middle ground.

Obviously, for our grandfather this was a nightmare. He was constantly assaulted with the high pitched harpy cries of his two granddaughters.

One day, amidst one of our fights, we heard Grandpa bellow from the front hall, “You two are sisters! You should love each other!”

This only caused us to stop briefly before the screeching began again. To us, fighting was part of how we loved each other. We never really physically hurt each other minus two times. Once Sam nailed me in the back with a massive universal remote (which dropped me melodramatically to the floor) and the other I shoved her into a wall for no reason other than I was mad at Mom and she was there.

After a few moments, while we were screaming at each other, we heard the heavy stomps of Grandpa coming up the stairs.

We lived in an older house that creaked with every step you took. We had learned over the years to be able to recognize who was walking around based on the sound of the creaking footsteps that the house made. Low and behold, Samantha and I had been blessed with our Grandfather’s gift as well. At least when it came to listening to houses creak.

This time it was rather obvious it was Grandpa coming up the stairs. He came barreling into the room after a few more heavy steps, bellowing over our screaming in a deafening roar, “If you two don’t stop this I’m going to take my belt off!”

Both Samantha and I stopped immediately. We’d never been struck as kids by an adult, so the idea that our giant of a grandfather was about to beat the crap out of us with a belt gave us both a sudden abject fear of the future.

It was then from way downstairs in the kitchen all three of us heard Grandma chime in with a warning tone, “If you do that, Tom, you’ll be chasing those girls with your pants around your ankles!”

Turns out Grandma had perfect hearing too. She also had a wonderful way of diffusing situations with random interjections. I’m pretty sure Sam picked up some of her word-weaving skills from Grandma.

Anyway, Grandpa’s face immediately went beet red. He grumbled something beneath his breath before storming off, leaving Sam and I stuck in an awkward place between receding terror and laughter. I can only imagine our Grandfather’s contorted and embarrassed expression as he stormed back down the stairs in the wake of his granddaughters’ giggles.

“I have to go to the bathroom…”

It’s pretty obvious by this point just how sick my sister was as a kid. Super sick. The various doctors she was sent to all had different diagnoses as well. First it was cancer then when proven it wasn’t cancer there was a long list of different diagnoses that I’m not even going to try to pronounce. Inevitably they always defaulted back to cancer when they couldn’t prove what her actual illness was.

Part of the weird thing about Sam’s illness was it only really got bad in the springtime and lasted about midway through summer. She had small bouts during fall and winter, but nothing like how bad it was in the spring.

I think it was about age seven that it got even worse. She was so sick that my mom was taking her to the hospital on a weekly basis. Sometimes daily just for testing. During one of these tests, Samantha’s hair had become so tangled in the various wires and tubes attached to her that the nurse just cut off her beautiful fairy tale locks without permission from my mother. Of course Mom was furious, but for Sam it simply seemed like one less annoyance she had to deal with.

You see, my sister was a hardened veteran when it came to hospital testing. I’m not talking about normal tests either. Think catheters and tubes stuffed down your throat. At seven years old she wouldn’t even bat an eyelash at some of the things any of us in our adult lives would run screaming from. I’m twenty-nine now and if someone mentions catheter and me in the same sentence I have a panic attack.

Anyway, by this point in her young life, Sam had gone through some of the most painful, uncomfortable and traumatizing medical tests American hospitals had to offer. This was all par for the course for her. One day came when she was in for a usual check in. I don’t remember what she was actually there for, but I do remember how the short-lived visit began.

Sam was in the hospital bed waiting patiently for the inevitable. At some point she began shifting uncomfortably, but the adults were talking and this was one of her rare quiet moments. I watched her from the side of the room surrounded by hospital equipment that in my young mind had been transformed into various methods of torture that I was trying to ignore.

The doctor and nurses began moving toward my sister to insert the catheter to which my sister sat up and abruptly said, “I have to go to the bathroom.” The doctor stared at her a moment and the nurses looked to him for their next move.

My mother chimed in, “Alright, sweety. Let’s go.”

I remember the doctor turned to my mother and gave her a very harsh look over the rim of his 1980s fabulous glasses. They were the kind with the big brown rim that were a rip off of Buddy Holly’s but way tackier. My mother paused as the doctor began to speak. “She’s just trying to avoid what’s coming.”

My mother’s brow knit, but I could see she was second guessing herself. Our mom knew Sam. She knew this little girl had gone through far worse than the insertion of a catheter and she knew that Sam could handle it. But… this doctor might know better because he was in fact a doctor and must have a lot of experience with children and he could very well be right. Sam might be avoiding it. After a moment my mother nodded and the doctor and nurses began moving toward Samantha again.

Sam fidgeted again and repeated herself as if they hadn’t heard her the first time, “I have to go to the bathroom.” It was when they put their hands on her she began to struggle and cry. My mother moved forward again as one of the nurses tried to keep my sister pinned down and still. I watched the doctor gesture to the other attending nurse who then moved to usher my mother by force out of the room, dragging me along with her.

We could hear Sam screaming outside the door that was now guarded by the nurse. I remember my mother began to cry, holding her hands over her mouth as she heard the wails of her pained daughter. I held onto her side, burying my face against her and trying to drown out my sister’s screams as we were forced to wait.

It was about the same time that I felt my mother’s entire body tense and her prepare to launch at the nurse that the screaming stopped. There was a very long silence before the door cracked open and the doctor with the ugly glasses stepped into view. His entire torso was sopping wet, painted in a thin yellow coat of fresh urine.

He stared at my mother a moment and then stormed down the hall. Of course we ignored the rather flabbergasted guard nurse and hurried into the room to find the other nurse apologizing to my sister (who was also soaked in urine) over and over again.

Sam was so sweet. She was patting the nurse’s hand and in her little, sick voice told the woman who was on the verge of tears that it was alright and, “I’m sorry. I just really had to go to the bathroom.”

We never let that doctor near Samantha again.

A Cruel Rejection

This next story I don’t particularly remember clearly, but it was our mother that regaled me with the tale in my ‘teens and I’ve felt utterly guilty for it since. This tidbit is about the cruelty of children. Namely how cruel I was as a child.

Let me back up a little bit and give some exposition on who Samantha was at four years old. Sam was much different than I was. I had always been a shy child. I always said “please” and “thank you.” I was generally soft-spoken  to the point that our grandmother would make me repeat myself over and over until she gave up on trying to hear whatever it was I was trying to say.

Sam was none of these things. In fact, even physically we were completely different. I had straight, dark brown hair. She had golden and long curls that looked like something you’d find painted across a the page of a fairy tale. I had dark brown eyes while Samantha had rich grey/blue eyes that changed hue depending on the color she was wearing. Even at seven and a half, I was unreasonably jealous of my sister’s beauty.

Not to mention the fact that Sam had the ability to entrance an entire room just by walking in. You see, Sam didn’t actually walk anywhere. Normal people walk… but Sam wasn’t normal. Sam danced wherever she went. I’m not kidding. The kid didn’t walk or run. She danced and skipped. On top of that, unlike me who rarely spoke, she talked all the time. And not just talked, she sang. If Sam had something to tell you, you’d get a light hearted aria or a tragic ballad rather than the usual disjointed stories children tell.

She was magical. People saw it too. And here I was, a normal kid a little bit too short for her age constantly upstaged by her baby sister. Beyond that Samantha was sick. How was I ever going to compete with that?!

I’m not talking about a cold either. Until the age of twelve, my sister was constantly in and out of the hospital because of a mystery illness… but we’ll get to the details of that a little bit later.

Now that you have a better idea of just what I was dealing with at the time and where my mind was at, the cruelty of the lines that follow hopefully will have a little perspective.

It was an early evening in our house on Chrisanta in Mission Viejo, CA. Simple suburban living. Back in those days my sister and I were both addicted to the show Fraggle Rock. Now as all you old schoolers know, Fraggle Rock was only on HBO. Any time the HBO intro logo came on (you know, the one that made the “BwoooooooOOOOOAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!” sound), Sam and I came  running from whatever room we had been in in hopes that soon we would be watching the antics of Red and Mokey. * (**Sam swears up and down to this day that her favorite fraggle was not Red and it was Mokey… but I clearly remember her bouncing around pounding on walls and calling herself “Red” with pigtails in her hair.)

I was already sitting in front of the television this particular evening with a blanket and glass of juice, ready for the impending story of doozers and fraggles to commence. Sam wandered in, not feeling particularly well. She had her “heart blanket” with her. When Sam first started getting really sick, our Mom made her a special little quilt lovingly named the “heart blanket.” You could tell Sam really wasn’t feeling well if she was dragging that thing around.

Tonight was one of those nights.

She was so sick at this point she couldn’t dance. She couldn’t even walk. Along with her heart blanket, this poor, withered, little creature was dragging a bucket. Like the heart blanket, Sam had a medium sized bucket to carry with her if she wasn’t feeling well as she had bouts of vomiting that went along with her illness.

So, here I was wrapped up and ready to go and up crawls Sam and heaves herself beside me in front of the TV with her blanket wrapped around her and her bucket sitting in her lap. And soon after, I did the only thing I will truly regret for the entirety of my life. As the show began, Sam could barely keep herself upright so she began slowly leaning. Eventually she was leaning against my side. She was up in my personal space. I was going to have none of it.

Instead of quietly asking Sam to move over, or gently redirecting her to lay on the floor… I shoved her. Hard. So hard that she went toppling to her side and just lay there and began to cry. Great! Now I was going to be in trouble. In a miniature fit, I stood up and threw my empty cup down then stormed off leaving my poor, sick sister crying on the floor.

Even now, typing the story out I can feel myself begin to tear up. As a child you don’t realize the depths of your actions until you’ve aged to a point that you can appreciate the moments. Now, I look back at that story and feel a deep sense of remorse. It was small and brief. Even Sam has told me that she forgives me and doesn’t really remember it, but I know within me I have an ability to be cruel and without compassion. That for a time my jealousy was so potent that I couldn’t see that my sick sister that I love with all my heart just wanted to cuddle and take comfort with me.

Sam has told me on more than one occasion not to regret because that forfeits the rights of your life. Because if you didn’t do the things you have done, you wouldn’t be who you are now. Of course, she said it much differently during those conversations. Sam always has a way of embedding wisdom in layers of zany ridiculousness. Like, “I ran over a rabbit today and I mourned its death, but then I realized that maybe that rabbit was the reincarnation of Hitler. It was bunny Hitler and I didn’t feel so bad.” It’s an art.

Yes, Sam really believes she killed bunny Hitler.