The Lessons of My Sister

The values we take through life start at home. I was lucky my home had my sister.

Marylynn and me.

After death and taxes as things inevitable, I think comes politics. I’ll admit I’m guilty as the next guy for stirring the pot, but when I recently detected it in an ad for a pancake mix, I thought, No. Just, no. This campaign to drizzle division on my pancakes demanded a call to action. How do we carve out the middle ground? How can we get past this? When I look for an answer, I find it in lessons my sister taught me.

My oldest sister Marylynn Garbin died in December, 2020 from liver cancer, leaving behind her wife and daughter. Among my last words to her, I promised to tell her story. Part of that story, I think, has some relevance to this blog’s goal to find ways to recover from the discord of the past few years.

Marylynn served as my first major influence. In our single-parent home, Marylynn practically raised me. Our mother worked all of her life, and especially in the years after the divorce where she often took on two jobs to make ends meet. On the day the cancer finally claimed my sister, I posted, “If you ever found anything endearing about me, you can probably credit Marylynn.” 

Statistically speaking, young men growing up in that environment face a higher risk of criminality. Eventually, I came to credit Marylynn for keeping my life from spinning out of control. She embodied my conscience. The thought of disappointing her was simply not something I could ever face. 

Growing up without a father, I looked up to her literally and figuratively. Marylynn taught me how to tie my sneakers, how to ride a bicycle, and how to read a clock. She loved the Red Sox, so I loved the Red Sox. She taught me how to hit a baseball. In the days when the local paper covered little league games, a blurb described me as one of the “big sticks” of the game. Thereafter, she cheered my every at-bat with, “Let’s go, Big Stick!”

She laid the foundation of my musical tastes, introducing me to The Beatles and Elton John. We shared a sense of humor as fans of Bill Cosby, Lilly Tomlin, and Monty Python. Music and humor would intersect at the end of a bus ride from Springfield to Boston for my thirteenth birthday. As I stepped off, I announced, “Boston! Just as I pictured it! Skyscrapers and everything!” She immediately got the joke. 

It was a that trip that changed my young life. I saw my first live musical — Godspell — staged the Wilbur Theater. Afterwards, she took me on my first subway ride to my first visit to Harvard Square. I emerged from the Red Line station into a wonderland of quirky shops and vibrant street life that would become an obsession for me. She later gifted me a copy of The Beard and the Braid, a collection of watercolor illustrations by Barbara Westman that perfectly captured the mood and energy of the Square in the late 1960s to early 1970s. As I turned the pages, I all-but-wished myself into those drawings. 

Not yet the driver of the Massachusetts Miracle, Boston was still the Hub of the Universe, and Harvard Square was the cotter pin. For the next six or seven years, it was my favorite place on the planet, a passion that reveals my pathetic provincialism perhaps, but Springfield was nothing like it. From my fascination with everything collegiate, I gained an expanding appreciation of architecture and art and food, and maybe most importantly, tolerance. 

Couple walking in Harvard Square by Barbara Westman.

People in the Square were weird, and I found that fascinating. They were young and smart and they ate frozen yogurt and read books my public school would never assign nor would my classmates ever read. The theaters ran movies by French directors and the radio played tracks off of whole albums. People shared tables with total strangers at Mr. Bartley’s Burger Cottage! The whole square played like a three-ring circus of the eclectic. How could I get more of this into my life? Clearly, I had to get out of Springfield and go to college — just like my sister. 

As I entered adulthood, our tastes would diverge of course. My musical choices branched off in a different direction and our politics sometimes clashed. Still, her influence informed those decisions. Through Marylynn, I embraced critical thinking and skepticism, and a conviction that disagreement did not necessarily to lead to disrespect.

Marylynn’s feminist-driven advocacy taught me the importance of fighting for a just cause and in leading a principled life. I’m hardly perfect, and I’ve eaten my share of humble pie, but I do believe that the principled life demands attitude adjustments and occasional contrition. 

That’s me in the heart of Harvard Square in 1976 hoping that Barbara Westman works me into the follow up book that never happened (nor to the best of my knowledge, was ever planned).

In a practical sense, my exposures to that collegiate environment inspired a useful piece of travel advice. When planning the classic American cross-country road trip, stay off the interstates of course, and plot a route from big college town to big college town. The food is better and the downtowns have more life.

Today, I consider myself fortunate to have grown up in a racially diverse, working class neighborhood, graduating from a similarly diverse city high school. As rowdy pups enduring the give-and-take of adolescence, I know that my classmates and I accepted diversity without obsessing about it. We carried that ethos into adulthood. I left high school actually optimistic about our progress. I saw it first hand. I lived it, but I’m hard pressed to see this perspective reflected in the media. I think my classmates would say much the same. 

Marylynn indulging my newfound love of photography — and hats — in 1979.

I regard having a whip-smart, kind-hearted, Lesbian feminist sister who loved and supported me every step of the way as I progressed through life as a gift. I don’t think Marylynn was right about everything, but I know that her heart was always in the right place. I saw that in how she lived her life, among the friends that supported and loved her back, in the laughter of the children under her care, and in her sincere and steadfast belief in her guiding principles. I hope you see it too.

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Mr. Bartley Endures

Except for the street alignments, little in Harvard Square looks the same today as it did when I first emerged from the subway in 1974, but Mr. Bartley’s Burger Cottage is still there and still going strong. I’m not sure you have to share a table with strangers.