As the middle child in my particular situation, I was always too young to be included in anything my big brother was doing with his friends, and I was always too old to be involved with activities connected to my sister.
In other words, a 12-year-old pre-teen boy doesn’t want his 9-year-old brother hanging around, and that same 9-year-old boy wanted nothing to go with a 5-year-old sister.
But there were THOSE times, like when my brother was racing away from me on his bicycle and I got hit by a car trying to keep up! Or when he took me on my first hilltop climb and decided to ditch me near the top just to frighten me. And there was that time when my siblings played along with my parents when they hid away all my Christmas presents to pretend Santa left me off his list.
Yay, right? Good times?
My little sister was always one of the coolest kids I knew back then (and yeah, I’ll take credit!), and my big brother was always there to be MY big brother. He saved me from disco, for example, at the very moment he heard me tell my mother I wanted the soundtrack to “Saturday Night Fever.”
“Oh no,” I remember him saying. “We’re not going to have anything of that crap in this house.”
That’s when I first heard Pink Floyd, Led Zepplin, the Rolling Stones, and The Beatles.
And John gave me advice, too, like when he was 17 and I was a mere 14 years old. He said, “Whatever you have to do, or not do, just make sure you don’t make a girl mad.”
Huh?
”A mad woman is worse than trying to explain to Dad why you got a speeding ticket in his Oldsmobile.”
And that made sense to me, and he knew it would. I mean, who doesn’t know it was nearly impossible to speed in one of those Oldsmobiles.
Rachel, though, is the “baby” in her family with a couple of sisters and a brother, and her sister Lizzy will be in the Bordas & Bordas Studio later this afternoon to tell as many hilarious stories as possible about her little sister. Be sure to tune in!
“Novotney Now” – 3-6 p.m. with “The Rachel & Steve Show” from 3:30-5 p.m. on River Talk, 100.1 FM and AM 1290 in the Wheeling area, and 100.9 FM and AM 1430 in the Steubenville/Weirton markets.
