Abby

My sister Abby was the center of the known universe for eight good years before I came along and ruined everything.  She could not hide her black-hot hatred.  My parents kept my crib in their bedroom for a year because they thought she might try to smother me in the night.  Family lore has it that she broke my arm twice in failed attempts to do me in.  As I grew older and harder to damage, she alternately ignored my existence and tormented me without mercy.  Despite everything, I worshiped her like a god.  She was the smartest person I knew. She painted her room orange and wore nothing but black for two years.  She stood up to our father.

We shared what we considered an abusive childhood, although much later when I became a foster parent I realized it didn't come close.  Our father was a tin-pot dictator; an angry, bitter man who was only happy when denigrating someone else.  Our mother was a saint when she was sober.  Abby and I wanted nothing more than to get out of the house, but she was older and had more means at her disposal.  She tried to move in with friends, sleeping in bedroom closets so parents wouldn't know.  She tried to run away, once making it all the way to New York City.  When I was eight years old she figured it out.  My 16 year-old sister, her 18-year-old husband and their infant son moved into a one-bedroom apartment of their own.

Overnight the sister who couldn't stand me became my protector and constant companion.  She'd escaped from the house and was determined to spring me as well.  She let me stay overnight whenever I was allowed to, first in that tiny apartment and and ultimately in a mortgaged split-level ranch in a spanking new 1960s subdivision.   We called ourselves the BLEESTER SEESTERS and sang Wobbly anthems, Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie, and Old Testament gospel at the top of our lungs.  We memorized Woody Allen and Jonathan Winter comedy albums.  We took car trips to parks and beaches with the baby in a laundry basket in the back of the Rambler station wagon.  We were mesmerized by the Buckley-Gore debates and could recreate every one, each of us playing either part.

Having an older sibling was invaluable -- she introduced me to Bob Dylan and pop art, explained Civil Rights and Freedom Summer, shared her cigarettes and joints and horrible 16 mm pornography.  When I went away to college, I did my best to return the favors.  For the first time my world was larger than hers, and I tried hard to bring it all back home.  I found anarchist professors, Marxist authors, student activists and libertarian economists and laid them on her doorstep like a cat leaving mouse parts on the pillow.

I never loved anyone as much or felt as special.  We called ourselves a gestalt -- not sisters or best friends but different parts of a single being.  But time moves on, decades pass, things change. In retrospect I can see we were once so close because we came from a small family in a tiny town and had a common enemy.  In time we both escaped, divorcing the past, acquiring husbands and lovers and children and friends and interests and experiences we couldn't share.  Over the next 40 years there were times when we felt as close as teenagers, times that were strained, and times when we were hardly in touch at all.

If Abby had found time to write her memoirs, I think they would have started after she moved to Gainesville and found her own real self.  She discovered her own voice and her own passions.  She raised five remarkable sons and daughters and married the love of her life.  She did not just rage against injustice and inequality, she fought it tooth and nail.  She lived more fully than anyone I've ever known, loved her family and friends as fiercely as anyone ever did, and never for a single moment looked back.  I needed to take this moment to look back, and now I'll try to move on.

Abby Goldsmith, 7/21/1945 - 4/27/2015.