Margaret!

March 14th!
Today we celebrate the birth and life and of my sister Margaret.

Will she be happy that I cared enough to post a blog entry all about her on her birthday!

Perhaps NOT!

I will do it any way and call it GIFT!

Margaret entered this world as the second little girl born to Ron and Holly.

Little did she know that she would, in rather quick succession, share her world with two more little sisters. Sixteen months would see the arrival of the first of them.

Followed fourteen months later by the second.

She had many great adventures growing up with so many sisters. Not to mention the excitement of having an insane mother!

She always marched to her own beat. While she participated in playing dolls and barbies with us, she took much more delight in cutting their hair and making them over. For example, I had a Marie Osmond barbie type doll that she buried in the garden once. When spring arrived, Dad got out the rototiller to turn the earth for that years planting. Not only dirt turned up that year. Soon arriving on the surface was a mutilated Marie. All was not lost! Margaret quickly removed her head and attached it to the body of a perfectly fine barbie. However, Marie was not a regular barbie. She was larger. So this was now a big head on a small body. Not to worry! Margaret quickly fixed that as well. She cut off all her hair and tied a homemade kerchief around her head. I think she may have wrapped her body with rags to give her a thick appearance. Next, a calico dress belonging to a small baby doll was confiscated and reassigned to the barbie now renamed "Aunt Jemimah".

Margaret also had toys that most girls don't play with. She had all kinds of Fisher Price safari toys. Jeeps, animals, hunters and the like. She would often be in the large garden (big, square area of dirt) creating roads and having adventures. Truthfully, we all enjoyed playing with her toys in that dirt.By the time we were all in high school her creativity was quite evident. Margaret became quite the writer and artist. Let me prove it to you! One time she and her friend Keli wrote their own tongue twister. How can I possibly remember this so many years later? Why, she used my name in it of course. I shall now share it with you. Please do not be offended, for I assure you, I wasn't.

"Sleazy Suzee sells herself on South Seventh Street singing songs that sometimes sound sour."

She often drew me pictures and left them in my room to find. Oh yes! I saved them! Who could possibly know that someday this public medium we know as the Internet would be available, making it possible for me to upload and share them with all of you. These things have been stored in my cedar chest for more than 20 years now. I am so excited to use this public forum to display them.

How exciting that she actually signed this one so she can never deny that it is her work. Now, let me explain this picture and tell you what is written at the top. This is me and my best friend Loraine. Perhaps you can not see the ribs sticking out. How emaciated we look, or the fact that we have IV's in our arms. Also, there is some great underarm hair on me. I guess she thought I was too thin back then. I had a thing for Neil Schon, the lead guitarist for Journey. In this picture we are at a Journey concert with a nurse. The writing across the top reads, "Look Loraine, it's Neil Schon! And he's looking right at us!" From Loraine "Oh look at that guy over there by the south exit!" And from the nurse "Ok let's get back into the ambulances!"

This next one is an artists rendition (Margaret's) of our backyard. I am sunning myself by the pool. There is the son of a family friend who spent a summer with us (drove us all crazy cuz we were not used to teenage boys in our house) floating, deceased, in the pool. And the dog known as the poopy puppy, along with all the glorious messes he made, is next to the pool.

One night I arrived home and found a lovely story, handwritten (2 pages), taped to my bedroom door.

Let me give you a brief summary of The Smell. This is a little ditty about the stink that was my room. How scientist gathered to find the source. Neighbors moved away, etc. Did my room smell, I hear you asking yourselves. No. Was my room a teenage pigsty? Probably. This was Margaret's way of lovingly letting me know that it was time to clean my room. By the way, this story is signed at the end with a paw print and a signature that reads THE WHIP. In reference to my cat's tail, I can only assume after all these years.

All these things might sound mean to you, but I assure you they were done with love and a twisted sense of humor. Right, Margaret? Unlike our oldest sister Bev, Margaret was nice most of the time. Her first car was a lovely kelly green thing. The license plate had the alphabet characters TRD, so it was lovingly called the Turd. She would happily allow her younger sisters to borrow her car to run errands and go to dances on the weekends. Bev would never allow us to drive her crappy Nova.

Happy Birthday Mugzy! Thanks for the fun memories from our childhood! I love you!