Sisters Sorta

There's a huge age gap between me and my half siblings. They were pretty much married or moved out by the time I was old enough to remember anything. My brother and I have kept tabs on each other the most.

The last time I visited my oldest half sister, it was 1997. My nephews were both in the Marines and home from Japan and we went to see them. One was getting out for good, and one was going to San Diego and staying in.

As for seeing my other half sister, the year was 1993. MiniMe was about 3 or 4 months old at the time. My sister was having a smallish gathering and it included their other half sister from their mom’s remarriage.

Over the years, my attempts at connecting with them have gone by the wayside. The unanswered phone calls, emails, and notes have piled up. Other than that visit to see my nephews in ’97, there have been a handful of sporadic Christmas cards from the oldest one and that’s it.

We’ve gone down different paths and although I haven’t been in direct contact, I know through other family members the direction each of their lives have taken.

Sister #1 is the free spirit. You never know where she’ll be or how to reach her.
She’s lived all over the place from the east coast to Alaska. She’s rarely in the same state for six months, much less the same house. She’s lived her life as a biker and been a bouncer/bartender in places that most grown men would wet their pants before entering.

Sister #2 is a mouthier version of sister #1, except that her travels and moving are confined to a 200 mile radius in the state. Five minutes of her talking makes truck drivers and sailors blush. The only time she ever asked me to come and spend time at her house was when she needed a full time/live in babysitter so she wouldn’t have to worry about her kids waking up to an empty house if she went to jail after carousing in bars. (Yeah, that actually happened when I was 15)
Otherwise, getting in touch with her is like trying to contact someone in the mob…you gotta know somebody who knows somebody who knows somebody. Then you wait for her to call *you*.

Fast forward to yesterday. This is the message out of the blue on my answering machine:

This is your sister. My number is [###-####] and the reason I’m calling you is because [sister #1] and [other half sister] and I are planning a trip in ’09 that’s just “sisters”. We are going to take a train and go to Maine for a week and we would like to know if you would like to go along and be the fourth sister.

No smart remarks. No swearing. Other than being completely out of the blue, it sounded normal…that is *if* we’d been in contact on any level whatsoever over the course of the last decades.
I picked up the phone, but I didn’t call her. I called my brother to see if he knew what was going on, if there was some important event in that state, if there was anyone our family knew up there, if one of the sisters was dying (or if *I* was dying!), and just generally ask him what he thought. He told me that one of two things was happening;
Either they
(1) decided to put aside their wild child ways for a week and try to reconnect with me to make some sort of fluffy memory moment to scrapbook,
Or
(2) They needed a fourth person to pay for some part of everything and be a designated driver 24/7 and hold their hair back so they don’t puke in it.
Monty, I’ll take door number TWO!!
Not going.