OLDER SISTERS

I am currently writing and designing a book along with the storyteller that gives the reader a little glimpse into life in the late 1940's and early 1950's in Brooklyn NY about a nine-year-old boy playing on the streets.

The story centers on a six-month period from early summer until New Year's Day. The people included in this story are friends from the streets, and family, mostly immediate members of the household.

There is one aspect of the story that touches me deeply and that is the young boy's older sister. It takes me back to those days when Mom and Dad relied on my older sister for everything, from chores to traveling to shopping, and she was just a child, a few years older than me.

All too often she was responsible for me, going and coming home from school, it was her that was there for my first day of kindergarten, making sure that I got cookies and milk for the day, and that I safely got to my classroom.

As a child, I recall my very first snowstorm, a rather nasty one that closed down transportation and the city for a few days. The snow had fallen and it was piled up on the sidewalks on top of the cars parked along the curb, unable to get out due to the plowing that was done to seal in all the cars.

I recall all the kids being outdoors playing in the snow and my sister brought me down with a large serving spoon because we didn't have any toys for the storm, her helping me up onto the pile of snow and my digging into it.

But she was always there, shopping for Olympia's Gift Shop and buying things like cartons of cigarettes and candy, going onto the subway to purchase these items and she might have been maybe 10 or 11 years old.

She taught me how to dance and how to drive, and as the years went by we grew close, we withstood family crisis and dealt with it together, and she had a protective hand always before my eyes.

Writing this book and telling the story of Pepino and his older sister has been an adventure and reminder of what life was like as a child with the benefits of an older sister.