8 Minute Memoir (A Sibling)
I forget where I saw the 8 Minute Memoir, but it seemed like a good writing exercise so I figured I’d jump on board. I’m already incredibly behind and have no idea when/if I’ll finish it. Such suspense!
We called ourselves The Triple Threat. Actually we didn’t call ourselves anything. The neighbor, however, called us “the boys” to stir us up which, of course, worked. It’s fine, though, because we called him Mr. Sillitti like the respectful children our mother raised us to be so it all balanced out in the end.
There were 3 of us which meant if it wasn’t two against one, it was probably one against one trying to get the third on our side to restore the natural order of things and make it two against one again. And while we spent most of our time being horrible to each other, there was also time spent not being total monsters. Like Friday night wrestling during TGIF commercial breaks (RIP M’s overalls). Or when we’d band together to oh so sneakily (read: a lot louder than we thought we were so our mom did in fact know exactly what was going on) bring the toad we found outside into the downstairs bathroom to watch it swim in the sink. And of course the time we staged an entire production of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat in our living room.
It was the middle of summer and our mother had been regularly abandoning us to go to work so we were on our own to keep ourselves fed and entertained. We subsisted on microwaved hot dogs and I Love Lucy reruns, but at some point we got the bright idea to put on the Joseph soundtrack and act the whole thing out. We each had our roles, spent the afternoon rehearsing, and when our mom got home, we made her sit through the whole damn thing. I’m sure there were at least 982 times during that hour she regretted her decision to be a modern working girl, but I’m also sure there were at least 982 times during that hour she was just thankful we didn’t have M tied to a jump rope walking up and down the street pretending to be our dog again.
Soybeans, Too 