You are currently browsing stories tagged with “Siblings.”
I am apologizing to Michelle because I’m crying and I don’t know why. I’m not sad or anything, I’m actually having a good time. This is one of the first times that Michelle and I are hanging out outside of class, and we don’t know each other well yet. But tears keep running down my cheeks and I’m really self-conscious [...]
Sitting in the second row of the balcony at the New York City Center ballet, I, sixteen, entranced by the melodies of Swan Lake, watched a tall, muscular sun-god pirouetting and jeteing on the stage. As he soared, I gasped at the height of his jumps and his sure-footed landings. But I had not come to behold his square shoulders, [...]
[This list contains all the nicknames of kids I can remember from my childhood (age 7 - 21, approx.) in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. See explanatory notes for each nickname below.] 1. Angelo Head 2. Rabbit 3. Ape 4. Frankie Airlines 5. Joey All-Star 6. Vinnie Barbarino 7. Turtle 8. Tortoise 9. Harry O. 10. Frank Asshole 11. Cosmonaut 12. Davey [...]
Daniel and Donald were the boys who lived next door to me when we were growing up. Well, they weren’t boys, really, but it was before the expression “teenager” was popular for those past childhood. By the time I was old enough to notice them - and their mother, a widow, Grace Grant - they were tall strapping young men. [...]
When I was a young man—no bigger than this A chocolate egg cream was not to be missed Some U-bet’s chocolate syrup, seltzer water mixed with milk Stir it up into a heady fro—tasted just like milk You scream, I steam, we all want Egg Cream. --Lou Reed from the song [...]
My younger sister, Chola, a second grader at Our Lady of Good Counsel, is chosen for a special part in the school play. My sister is real cute and the Sisters adore her. Chola loves Sister Romona and gave her a candy necklace for Christmas. She helps Sister Romona erase the blackboard every day and bangs the erasers together in [...]
My sister Betty and I are in the HOV lane cruising east on the LIE toward her house in Suffolk County. She is in the front seat next to me in the The Silver Fox, my Subaru Forester, wrapped in a light blanket against the still cool April air. Bets is my older sister, ten years older than I am. [...]
The weather is turning. At home I didn’t notice the wind, but by the time we’d walked all the way to the library our ponytails held only half as much hair as they did when we left. There was an easy remedy: hold the band between your teeth, gather up the loose strands, pull them through the loop a few [...]
After our engagement my family had decided that I would be allowed to talk to Fatmir on the phone. When my niece was engaged she had to make secret phone calls, but my family was modern. In anticipation for the phone call Asllan and Behare went out and took Sokol’s three boys. My Mom and Sokol’s wife were at their [...]
A few years ago in my father’s eighty-first year, my brother Patrick and I went to his house to spend Thanksgiving. My father lived in the Bronx at that time. We are the only children in the family still living in New York. Neither of us particularly wanted to spend the day in my father’s unkempt, dusty place, but he [...]
It was me, the girl standing in front of the Krusq, the wedding party, wearing a wedding dress. How did it happen? What went wrong? I had asked God to change things. I didn’t like the man I was going to marry -- but I had no choice. “On the day you were born God wrote on your forehead who [...]
August 1987. New York City shimmers in the heat. Everyone we know is on vacation. “Where’s Daddy?” Anna whimpers. She’s two. “I want Daddy.” “I do, too, but he’s at work, Annie.” I try to edit the anger out of my voice. “He’s very busy. He’s getting ready for a trial. Do you know what a trial is?” “I know, [...]
In the divorce papers filed by my ex-wife, the second one I mean, she said I never paid attention to her. While we were still living in the same house she also said, “You never listen to me.” “What?” I generally responded from the other room. For the record, I am, in fact, a great listener. But she was right, [...]
Early March 1954, in a Woodside apartment overlooking the # 7 Subway El and the Long Island Railroad station below it, two express trains crisscrossed, one rattling over the other. “Bob, please get me some food.” Patricia pleaded from the kitchen to the living room. “There’s plenty of food,” Bob answered as he played with the bunny ears antenna on [...]
I felt like I owed him something, even if I couldn’t say what. It wasn’t money. I closed my eyes like a dead man and gave those coins to the nuns on the corner. My brother is a music publisher. I’m not really sure what this means, but I’m proud. People always ask about it. It’s not the usual thing [...]
“What should we serve for dinner?” often translates, for me, into, “What should we speak at dinner?” My household is the confluence of five languages. I’m French and my husband is Haitian and Italian. Our older son married a young woman from Taiwan while our younger son’s fiancée is from Trinidad. This mélange of native tongues can make the most [...]
“It’s not like I am going to die or anything.” My ten-year-old daughter Liza is begging me to let her walk alone to her school bus stop three streets from our Brooklyn apartment. She is as persistent as a lawyer in court, who, sensing that victory is at hand, refuses to let up on the line of questioning despite repeated [...]
I was riding in our friend’s red, rattling car. The car that had been filled with balloons to celebrate my last birthday—the time we traveled to visit Mom. Now my wife and I were going to inform my forty-five year old brother of her death. To inform, support, and console my kid brother—the brother who relied so heavily on Mom [...]
I have no kids and never wanted any, so I was a bit anxious about playing tour guide for my 14 year old niece, Shannon, on her first visit to New York City. But my brother John said she could not wait to see Manhattan. It was quite a trip for an eighth grader from the Jersey Shore. They arrived [...]
Since my boyfriend, Alexis, injured his shoulder playing pick-up basketball, he’s been watching games from the sideline. Usually he’ll just stop for a couple of minutes, en route to wherever he—or we—are going. If a pick-up buddy says, “What’s up?” he’ll sometimes give them one of those street-hugs, where they grab each other’s hand and bump chests. Then Alexis will [...]
Arriving before the engine, with fire blowing out two windows on the third floor and people in the street yelling, "There's two kids in there" our asses are about to be kicked and there is nothing we can do about it. It's 1977, and Lieutenant Annello leads the way as usual. He is simply the best fire officer I have [...]
An "incident" had occurred at the group home where my younger brother lives with five other men and three women who all have mental retardation. His supervisor, more amused than upset, followed procedure by notifying me and beginning an investigation. Fred, a 103 pound, 5’2” 52-year-old man, was discovered standing with his roommate of two years in their tiny room [...]
I learned a lot from my grandpa, John Francis O'Brien, a native of Cork city (Ireland) and an immigrant to America. He used to always say that he was closest to God when he was connected to nature. Grandpa was quite an unusual character in our working class neighborhood on Detroit's West Side, just a few miles from the city's [...]
Where do I begin? On Christmas Eve 1999, I was doing the usual stuff… Following my family's long tradition of going from one home to the next, delivering Christmas presents and cookies, eating and eating some more, singing carols, and sharing midnight mass together downtown. This year, my brother needed a ride back to his in-laws, so we us drove [...]
The public school kids of New York City learned that they could go to school 2 hours late during the strike. At least for the kids who live within walking distance of the school, and didn’t have to take a car service or walk miles in the cold, this was fun and exciting. When I went to pick up my [...]
[The following was originally published in "Piece From Life's Crazy Quilt," a collection of personal essays about growing up in Detroit in the 1920's, 30s, and 40s by Marvin V. Arnett. The collection first appeared in 2000, as part of the University of Nebraska Press's "American Lives" series (Series Editor: Tobias Wolff), and the University of Nebraska Press has shown [...]
My brother was thirteen years older than me. We had different values, he having grown up in a repectable working class slum and me, from age seven to seventeen, in a fancy suburb west of Boston. I took a lot of things for granted. But he had bought the American Dream, maybe because our mother was an Armenian immigrant fleeing [...]
My brother is a twenty-eight-year-old millionaire living in Greenwich Village. He drives a Boxster, owns a beach house in East Hampton, and recently bought an original one-sheet of Breakfast at Tiffany’s for the bargain price of twenty thousand dollars. Sometimes he asks me, his older and poorer sister, what I want or could use—cable TV, a new set of bike [...]
My cousins grew up in New York. I met them once in California, where I lived until I was seven. But when we moved to a Oxen Hill, suburb of Washington, DC, we began regular visits. This was in the late sixties. Thanksgiving in Manhattan followed by Christmas in Oxen Hill, or vice versa. My aunt and uncle rented or [...]
