Tattle Tales, The Fourteenth Week on the Second Year of The New Abnormal
I grew up with three siblings. If you grew up with siblings, as I did, you are familiar with the age-old enterprise of tattling. My younger sister, Susan, now Chova Sara, was the tattletale. She was the one that thought it important to report to my parents, usually our mom, whatever misadventures we were enacting. When I was six to her four, she ran to our mom to say I wasn’t letting her play with my Barbies. This was true, but only because she cut their hair and drew on them with crayons. Nonetheless, I had to release more dolls to her based on “fairness.” This made no sense to me, but she got what she wanted, and it spurred her on for years.
When I was fifteen she couldn’t get downstairs fast enough when she rifled through my drawers and found my almost full pack of Eve cigarettes. I was no smoker, but I did purchase a 75 cent pack to try and smoke at high school socials. I, a frizzy haired, acne prone teen with a penchant for musicals, wanted to seem cool. I imagined cigarettes was the entry point. I coughed more than I inhaled, thus ending a two-week foray into the impossible road to being a cool, cigarette-smoking kid. But I kept the pack just in…
