Tag: Marcia

Sister Marcia should do a movie blog

Ritz

It occurred to me that sister Marcia should do a movie blog. I love watching movies, but she devours them. And often the old ones, many of which I still haven’t seen, but she has viewed multiple times. And she’s very conversant about them.

We remember seeing West Side Story with our mom and sister Leslie. It must have been in a second-run theater because she’d have been too young to see the film in 1961. Still, I recall that the ticket taker was concerned that the violence would be too much for her. This was before the movie ratings were implemented in 1968. And maybe it was too “adult” for her, but she loved it.

As kids, we would occasionally get taken to the drive-in, often the one near the airport after the one on Upper Front Street closed in 1963. I don’t remember any of the films except The Dirty Dozen, and that is only because former NFL great Jim Brown was in it. Marcia likely remembers a lot more of them.

Trauma

She occasionally reminds me of when I was mean to her. I was supposed to take her to the Ritz Theater, a second-run cinema on Clinton Street. This was so traumatic that she remembers exactly where we were, in the shortcut from Gaines Street to Oak Street. Reportedly, I asked her what movie we going to see, and if she couldn’t identify it, I wouldn’t take her. She got very upset. Her memory is such that this story is probably true.

The Strand and the Riviera were theaters on Chenango Street in downtown Binghamton. Our mother used to work first at McLean’s Department Store, then at Columbia Gas, both of which were nearby. I imagine we saw a bunch of non-animated Disney fare or safe comedies such as With Six You Get Eggroll.

When I visited my family in Charlotte, NC in the 1970s and 1980s, I’d see movies with my mom Rocky, Star Trek IV, and Dreamgirls – it’s so weird that I remember these without prompts – and I imagine Marcia attended these as well.

But she has embraced Turner Classic Movies and various other platforms over the years. If I need a recommendation for a film in a particular genre, I know who to ask.

Happy birthday, sister Marcia.

Marcia: keeper of the photos

Happy birthday!

Marcia, May 1962

My sister Marcia has become the keeper of the photos. This is primarily a function of birth order.  The youngest and still in high school, she moved to North Carolina with our parents in 1974. Leslie and I were at colleges in upstate New York.

Our mother (d. 2011) had a slew of photos inherited from her mother (d. 1983). Virtually all family photos in this blog from the 19th and 20th centuries were scanned by Marcia or her daughter.

Hmm. I just noticed the matrilineal line of the pictures.

The photos have helped identify what some of our ancestors looked like, such as our great-grandmother Lillian Archer Yates Holland and HER father, James Archer.

My sisters and I are still doing near-weekly ZOOM meetings initiated by Marcia. We have talked some about our roots, though not in an exceptionally systematic way.

DNA comparison feature

According to an email I got about a month ago, Ancestry.com has a new DNA comparison feature where one can see how their DNA results line up next to their matches or compare results with anyone else who has shared their results with me.

I decided to look at my sister Marcia’s DNA compared with mine. I’m more Irish, while she’s more English. We’re equally Cameroonian, but I show more Nigerian, while she’s more Beninian.

I understand the vagueries of chromosomes, but I’m nevertheless fascinated by them.

The photo

The picture in this post is on the Clinton Street bridge, as any Binghamtonian could tell you. She’s facing west. The bridge over the Chenango River is just over a mile from our house at 5 Gaines Street. Perhaps it was taken for her birthday, though l cannot be sure.

Today is Marcia’s XXth birthday.  Happy birthday to the one who’ll always be my baby sister, no matter how old she gets. I love you, dear.

Marcia is in North Carolina

first song, third side of the white album

Front to back: Marcia, Leslie, Roger

There’s something fundamental that changes in the family dynamic when the parents have both died. So even though I’m in upstate New York, Leslie is in California, and Marcia is in North Carolina, we have managed to keep in touch over the past 11 years, possibly better than before the parents passed.

Leslie, I have seen her a few times, mostly because she’s traveled to upstate New York, for her high school reunion, for one. Then I went to San Diego when she had her bicycle accident in 2018.

Marcia, I haven’t seen her since my mother died in February 2011. Well, that is not ENTIRELY true. I have seen her on ZOOM probably 100 times since the pandemic began. Indeed, as I’m sure I mentioned before, she was really trying to get our sister and me to hold a regular meeting on Skype. But I found the platform wonky and unreliable and non-instinctive when we tried it seven or eight years ago.

I’m not sure that Zoom is more instinctive, but I’ve used it SO often that I’ve become mildly competent with its use. Zoom is more reliable now than Skype was then, which, of course, is not a fair comparison.

Still, I haven’t gone south, and she currently cannot travel much at all. So one of these days, I’ll have to sojourn down there. If I travel alone, that would probably mean the train, because I so loathe flying. To be clear, I’m not AFRAID of flying. I just hate the feeling of being in an airborne bus. The last time I went to Charlotte, it was by train.

Since my wife is retiring, maybe we could drive down, assuming we can find a suitable cat sitter for our flaky felines

Natal day

Oh, yeah, I should mention that today is Marcia’s birthday. She’s HOW old? Well, she’s younger than I, younger than Leslie. I’m trying, but failing, not to refer to her as my baby sister. She hasn’t been a baby in.. a while.

It’s weird not seeing people that you’ve known for years that you haven’t interacted with in person. One gets a little of that at high school reunions. Heck, COVID restrictions had that effect to some degree.

It’s different, though, with a sibling. They are, statistically speaking, the people one is likely to know for the longest continual amount of time. So sometime before her NEXT birthday, I’ll have to see Marcia face to face again.

Sister Marcia, the convener

old movies

Marcia.covid shotMy sister Marcia was asking that the family, i.e., my sister Leslie, she, and I – meet online on a regular basis for years. And years.

She wanted to use Skype or some such. As I vaguely recall, I found that platform unnecessarily wonky, and so… I didn’t say No, and I actually downloaded the software. MAYBE we used it once or twice, but I didn’t like it.

But as the saying goes, it takes a pandemic. The three of us have met almost every week for a year on ZOOM. Occasionally, we’ll get guest participants such as my wife or Marcia’s daughter. We pretty much fill two 40-minute slots. (Longer than that and I develop brain fog.)

Currently, she’s working on pricing a headstone for our maternal grandmother Gertrude (Yates) Williams, who died in 1982, and her sister Adenia Yates, who passed in 1966. Why my parents never took care of this is one of those unsolved mysteries.

One of these days, maybe in the summer, we’ll spend some time working on genealogy. Ancestry.com has provided us with approximately one jillion hints of possible connections. Anyone who’s ever spent any appreciable time finding their roots knows that it is a rabbit hole that would have Alice wondering.

Cinema

I may have seen more recent movies. But she has viewed FAR more movies from the last century, especially the 1930s through the 1960s, almost all of them released before she was born. I keep threatening to veg out on TCM or some other channel, but I haven’t done so yet.

So she knows who Barbara Stanwick is. I mean, I do too, but only because she was on the TV series The Big Valley (1965-1969), while she’ll know the performer from classics such as Double Indemnity (1944), but also from the more obscure fare.

For the most part, she knows her performers from the Studio Age of cinema. Of course, she has a pretty uncanny ability to recall things from our childhood, events I’ve long forgotten.

Happy birthday, baby sister.

Niece Alexandria is having a birthday

the middle Green cousin

Alexandria

My second niece is having a birthday today. Alexandria is the daughter of my sister Marcia.

I remember quite well the first time I met her. She was about six months old and we were at a wedding reception for a cousin of ours. (We managed to miss the wedding – long story…) Anyway, I got to hold her and she began crying. Marcia insists that it was because her shoes were too tight. I chose to believe that narrative.

One time when she was five or six, I had purchased this reversible outfit at an Albany event and then brought it down to Charlotte. It was a hit with her and her mother, and she got two or three seasons out of it. All right! I lucked out.

One of my favorite times with her was when she came up to Albany. Downtown, there was a series of temporary statutes. I know I took a ton of pictures with her interacting with these faux people. They are in this house, somewhere.

She was extremely helpful to Marcia in caring for my mother, particularly in mom’s difficult later years.

Employment

Alexandria had been working in a fast-food chain for a number of years, working her way up to a manager. So she has some great interpersonal and organizational skills. The thing is, middle managers in many jobs get the short end of the stick. Salaried employees get called on to show up when someone else fails to show up.

She has a new job this fall in distribution, and she seems to like it so far. It’s certainly far less stressful than her previous gig, as far as I can tell.

Of the three Green cousins, Alexandria is the middle one. She’s younger than Rebecca by about the same number of years as she’s older than my daughter. I’ve seen what a great older cousin RJ is to Alex, and Alex is to LPG. Alex would work on my daughter’s hair and patiently play dress up for hours.

Happy natal day, niece Alexandria. I love you.

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