A Slide Show

I can remember a time when my parents invited over some teacher friends to share with the whole family their slide show of their trip to Germany.  For a young person, this is nightmarish for multiple reasons:  firstly - it's hard enough that your parents are teachers in your hometown (the only thing worse would be if your parent was the pastor) but to have more teachers in the house makes a young persons hair follicles stand on end.  Secondly - If anyone remembers slides, they are tremendously cumbersome to actually display well.  Some of them are upside down; sometimes the slideshow engineer will get one stuck and spend ten minutes trying to 'unstick' the slide while simultaneously exclaiming, 'Ow, that bulb is hot' and blowing on their fingers.  Then, if that's not bad enough, they spend a good minute on each slide describing ad nauseum what the picture is already showing, giving background on each blade of grass and each syllable of conversation with each strange foreign national.  It's enough to give a young kid the heebie jeebies.  Lastly, there aren't any slides of yourself.  Pictures without me in them are, well, boring.


I guess that's why selfies are proliferating.  Whenever we look at pictures, we look for ourselves - we look to see if we have a part in the story, and if we don't, well... let's move on.


I've often thought what a slide show of my life growing up would be like.  Certainly there's the picture of my parents in early child mode - surrounded by three little satellites.  As this first slide goes in, I wonder what my parents were thinking.  Did they wonder why God had 'blessed' them so?  Were they wondering how they were going to make it financially?  If they were going to comment on this slide, what would they say? 


My first memories of my sister, Vikki, only go back to kindergarten or so.  I suppose that my parents have told enough stories of us eating dirt, or getting kicked down by the rooster, that we probably think that we remember, but really, the slide that comes up first comes from a picture of us attending kindergarten for the first time.  We're standing by a plastic wheel, one that children could crawl inside.  Our teacher, Mrs. Jacobsen, is smiling behind us.  She is diminutive with sandy blonde hair.  She wears a pleated dress and has her hands behind her back.  I saw her later on in our journey in the States, but I'll get back to that later.


Vikki stands in the middle of the two of us boys.  Ryan, on the right, I think.  When I look back at those pictures, I have difficulty telling us apart too.  But Vikki never did.  She always knew who I was. 


She still does.


It took a lot of years to figure out what sisters were for.  Mostly, when boys-with-sister are growing up, they kind of look at them as if they are some sort of alien life form.  Nothing seems to make sense.  At times, she is joyful and laughing and then .7 seconds later, some kind of bee has blown directly into her bonnet and she has become Godzilla with a negative attitude.  I wish I could put myself back in those slides now, just for a little bit, to see Vikki as she was then and tell her everything's gonna be all right.  I wish I could have told her that she was awesome and her true value is not dependent upon her physical beauty.  But brothers don't often do that when they are young; they have to wait until they really understand what sisters are for.


Sisters give the opportunity for brothers to practice protection.


Brothers give the opportunity for sisters to learn patience.


My little sister, Danielle (she has a nickname that my dad gave to her, which I won't share here), was born nine years after the three of us.  When she was growing up, she was more of a hindrance, I think - not because she was particularly perturbing, but she was like an anchor on a young boy's boat.  I can remember a night that my parent's decided that they were going to go out (a rarity for teachers in small town Iowa in those day.)  I was probably ten years old - Dani was still in diapers and not the nice, elastic-legged plasticky kind you see today.  No, no, these were old school cloth diapers with which you encased the lower half of their body with a rubber sack which supposedly gave them protection.  When you are ten years old, there probably is no worse fate than being left in charge of your diapered little sister. 


I don't know where Ryan and Vikki were at that time - babysitting someone else for money probably.  I got left with Dani and I was probably none to happy about it.  So, as my parents left, it was my job to entertain one-year-old Dani for the night.  Little kids like that don't need too much attention, I  though, so I probably let her run rampant around the house hoping she'd get tired at seven o'clock so I could watch Fantasy Island. 


Then, it happened.  Dani got really quiet.  Dear Lord, please let her find the ability to be toilet trained just for one night.  Quite the opposite, in fact.  Dani had found a way to defecate and fill her diaper and her rubber pouch in one swift explosion.  I don't know about you, but there are few things more disgusting than feces making an appearance up the shoulder blades of a little one.  She crawled towards me, legs splayed moving the movement a little farther up her back.  I probably gagged.  I am right now as I write this.


I wanted to run, but she would have found me.  Little turd basket.  So, I plugged my nose with one hand and did what my parents said.  I picked her up by her hands and carried her into the bathroom.  I didn't touch her abdomen or other side in anyway for fear that the rubber pant thing would pop like an excretory zit. 


She started to cry.  I was probably almost dislocating her shoulders, but I didn't care.  She had just dislocated my entire olfactory system.  Putting her down in the bathroom, I found the little cracked plastic mat and laid it on the floor.  Then I gathered the precious little bundle of... joy and laid her on the plastic.


I actually heard it, then.  Her rubber pants let loose and up the front of her shirt as well as the back.  Oh for heavens' sake, Dani.  What did you eat?  An entire watermelon?

Somehow I got her onesy off; I carried it with two pinched fingers while my other hand pinched my nose.  I just threw it in the sink.  Surely it's not the job of a young ten-year-old boy to rub out his sisters digested dinner.  By this time, Dani had gotten antsy and had rolled around off the mat and stepped in the streaks on the plastic mat.  She was making brown footprints in the bathroom.  My parents owed me a raise on the five dollars per month they were giving us for an allowance.


I picked her up by the hands again and placed her back on the wondrous mat where, after getting some wet toilet paper (I couldn't remember exactly what I was supposed to do - the aroma had fried my brain cells) I wiped down as much as I could stomach.  Certainly that was as thorough as a ten-year-old boy is going to be around that area of his one-year-old sister.  I think I probably closed my eyes in terror through most of it.


Then, the tricky part.  You have to hold down the one-year-old in order to figure out the incredible engineering feat of cloth diapers.  Supposedly you are supposed to fold them first, but I had had enough of this, so I took the first diaper and basically wrapped it around her like a bath towel.  I wanted to use diaper pins, but I was afraid I'd stick her.  Serve her right, though.  The problem, of course, with wrapping a diaper like a bath towel is that it doesn't really cover anything; it kind of just makes a pipeline...


But, that was as much as I could stomach.  That, and the fact that Tattoo and Mr. Roarke were standing on top of the bell tower waiting for the plane.  So, after the gift wrapping of my sisters waist, I pulled on the rubber pants sure that they would seal in any goodness for when my parents came home. 


Fantasy Island was good that night and so was the Love Boat.  I was mesmerized by the depth of the plot lines - always different, fresh, exciting and new.  So absorbed was I that I didn't notice that my parents were driving down the lane.  9:00. 


I was supposed to be in bed; so was Dani.


I looked over at the little grubber and she was in the final stages of downloading again.  I didn't swear when I was younger, but I'm pretty sure I could have come up with something.  But, my parents were home. 


So, I grabbed Dani by her fingers and carried her out the room, up the stairs, down two bedrooms and hauled her up over the railing of her crib.  Her rubber pants had leaked everywhere, but of course my parents wouldn't notice at all, would they?  So, I laid her down in the bed, covered her up, and she began to cry, I held a finger to my mouth.  Shhhhh.  Dani!  Help me with this.  Just pretend that you're asleep.  That's what I'm going to do.


So, I left her there, in bed, crying, hoping that my parents would be the most naïve people on earth. 


But they aren't.  And as they came upstairs to check on their crying baby and their fake sleeping son, I knew I was in trouble.  I could almost hear my mother exclaim from the downstairs bathroom, "What is this on the floor?  Are those footprints made out of...?"  And then I could hear my father standing over Dani's crib, and the gag fest that was occurring.  If there was anyone more allergic to dirty diapers, it was my dad.  And then I could hear him calling out, "Diane, Dani needs you!"  He walked down the hallway to where I was pretending my butt off that I was asleep.


"Nice try, Frederick."


I don't think my parents increased my allowance that night.


Of course both Dani and Vikki have changed.  Dani no longer requires rubber pants (or at least I don't think she does) and both Vikki and Dani stand tall as some of the strongest women I know.  I no longer look back at the slide show pictures of the two of them, seemingly overexposed, and wonder what sisters are for, I just wish that I could see them more often - not in still life; not in 1970's clothes or diapers or as teenagers, but just as they are now.  Both excellent mothers, both strong women bent on providing for their families until life fades into another life.  I wish I could do another slide show of them standing beside both Ryan and me and remember what it was like to live in the same house with my parents.


But that's what slide shows are for.  They are to start the story telling.  But it's the words that make the stories come alive.  Not the pictures, the words.  I never grow tired of hearing the stories about my sisters.