All Is Grace_ A Ragamuffin Memoir - Brennan Manning [12]
Notes
1 Alice Miller, Prisoners of Childhood (New York: BasicBooks, 1981), vii.
4
I mentioned my sister, Geraldine, but I haven’t really introduced her. Like I said earlier, my mother had prayed for a girl. I never heard her say that out loud or anything, but believe me, I knew. Her prayers were finally answered in 1943 with the birth of my sister. I was nine years old, and I remember that Gerry’s arrival brought a change to our household. Things were a little sweeter. I can’t say exactly how they were sweeter, they just were. For example, I remember watching my mother fix Gerry’s hair in the evenings, sometimes taking half an hour to get it just right.
Looking back, maybe it wasn’t so much that my mother or father had become sweeter. Maybe it was just that Gerry’s own innate sweetness had a ripple effect.
After my sister’s birth, my mother continued working during the daytime while my father kept looking for work and my brother roamed on his own. That left me to be my sister’s keeper.
Many mornings I would take Gerry by the hand and walk her up to McKinley Park in Brooklyn. We’d play there until my mother or father came home in the afternoon. I would always pack us a lunch of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches and a Coke. We loved to swing and slide and seesaw, but our favorite spot was the sandbox. I can’t speak for my sister, but for me the sandbox was a place of pure play—of childlikeness. It had definite boundaries, but inside those edges I was free to build and dig and just be. The “being” part was something I had lost; it was never allowed at home. I wish it would have been, but it wasn’t. So trips to the park to babysit were not a chore for me, a boy of twelve. They were a sanctuary.
Betty Smith published A Tree Grows in Brooklyn in 1943, the year of my sister’s birth. The book tells the story of dreamer Francie Nolan and her younger beloved brother, Neeley. Surrounding the lives of the children are Katie, the hardworking, breadwinning mother, and Johnny, the often-unemployed alcoholic father. Sounds sorta familiar, doesn’t it? Although my sister and I are quite different, I believe we both shared hopes like Francie’s:
My sister, Geraldine, and me
Let me be something every minute of every hour of my life. Let me be gay; let me be sad. Let me be cold; let me be warm. Let me be hungry … have too much to eat. Let me be ragged or well dressed. Let me be sincere—be deceitful. Let me be truthful; let me be a liar. Let me be honorable and let me sin. Only let me be something every blessed minute. And when I sleep, let me dream all the time so that not one little piece of living is ever lost.1
The “tree” in the novel is called ailanthus altissima, or the Tree of Heaven. It’s a pivotal metaphor used to represent the ability to thrive in a harsh setting. Here is Smith’s description:
Some people called it the Tree of Heaven. No matter where its seed fell, it made a tree which struggled to reach the sky. It grew in boarded-up lots and out of neglected rubbish heaps and it was the only tree that grew out of cement. It grew lushly but only in the tenements districts.2
It’s strange because there I was—in my opinion this worthless thing in my mother’s eyes—charged with responsibility for my sister: “You keep an eye out for her now,” my mother said. I felt like one of those Trees of Heaven, growing up in a severe environment, reaching and struggling. I like to think that maybe my branches provided a shade for Gerry in those days, a person she could look up to and feel safe with. I believed she loved me then, as I believe she loves me now. I wouldn’t say either one of us necessarily grew “lushly,” but we did grow.
Once, I remember my mother talking