-- Saturday, March 25, 2000 --

12:50 a.m. A most amazing bit of email tonight -- I heard from my little sister. One by one, my family members are coming online and discovering my increasingly larger and larger spot on the web. Hello little sister!

She is the one in the middle of the photo. I am the huge tall gangly one. My arms and legs were growing out of control that summer. I felt like a clodhopper and from that time forward, I have had no sense of style.

None. But this piece shouldn't be about me -- it should be about my sisters. The middle child is on the right and she is middle in every respect. We used to like to joke about that. She isn't the oldest or the youngest; our brother is the only boy. She is, perhaps, the most normal one of us because of her "non-special" status.

We are standing in what once was our big side yard and what is now an off-ramp for that booming Maine-to-Florida highway. I think it might be called I-95, but it's been a long time since I've been home for a visit and I forget the exact name of it.

At the point in my life pictured here, I'd come to believe in the Mafia. I believed they frequented the building you see behind us, which was a bar. It was left standing, by the way, (the only structure on our street that wasn't razed) when The Road came through. Coincidence?

My cousins and I actually used to order pizzas and have them sent to the bar -- that's probably why most pizza places in my home town started calling patrons back to double-check on the orders before sending delivery boys out into the night and sending girls into giggling conniptions when peeking out from behind dusty gauzy curtains.

My little sister is now all grown up, of course, and she's getting comfortable with a new lap top and all the bells and whistles. I stopped growing eventually, and even though I am only five feet, two and a half inches tall, I still feel like a big galoot most of the time.

It's amazing how permanent the wrong information is.

I used to mow the grass in that yard with a push mower. One of my cousins, who lived in the other half of our duplex, blew off his fingers with a homemade rocket in the basement. We had a chicken coop in the back yard and a pie cherry tree against the house.

Those were the years when I thought I was becoming a citizen of the world. We had summer drapes and winter drapes and big garden with asparagus in it. We had a front porch. I thought we were rich.

Maybe we were. What does "rich" really mean? Every which way I turned there were possibilities and opportunities. The sidewalk was aglitter and I knew people in every second car that cruised by. The phone rang all the time.

My mother made me a desk which is still my favorite desk of all time. She got a Formica countertop and ran it all the way across the front bedroom, wall to wall, under the windows. It must have had drawers underneath, but the important thing was that it was a light blue speckled thing with that curved backsplash that seemed so modern and nifty out of the kitchen and in the bedroom.

It was a very long desk. I think it enlarged my horizons and they've never really shrunk since. A very long desk.

Yes, we were rich.