Rita

(entry for 12/4/2024)

Looking back over the 27 previous posts in this blog, I sense that there’s a subject I’ve been avoiding. The subject has appeared peripherally, here and there, but there has not been a post yet dealing with the topic itself. Or rather, herself.

I’m talking about, of course, my sister.

And if I’ve been avoiding her, as indeed I believe I have, there’s at least one good reason.

I resented her from day one and never got over it.

I’m ashamed to admit it, but I know it’s true. I was jealous. I had been the ‘angel baby’ in the family for four years and two and a half months, and suddenly there was another baby. Not an angel, certainly, but still, a baby. What was not to be jealous of!?!

And yet . . .

In addition to being jealous, I must admit to another feeling as well. I always admired her way with words. She could coin unheard of new words, and even unprecedented phrases, like no one else I have ever known. And she could also misunderstand words and come up with astounding revelations of mis-information about them.

For example:

One time the family was on a trip together, I don’t remember where or when. I only know that I was less than ten and that she was less than six. Beyond that, the trip is a blur. Except for one thing.

We had a dog with us. It wasn’t my dog Ginger, who is the subject of an earlier post. So it had to be before Ginger, although I have no memory whatsoever of any dog in our lives prior to her. In any event, there was a dog, and the dog had to be let out of the car from time to time to do its ‘business,’ as people nowadays are fond of saying. Except we referred to it in a different manner. My dad came up with a name for it, and we all thought it was cute, and it caught on and stuck.

‘Posting the dog,’ is what he called it. Perhaps at some point an actual post had been involved, and the dog had pee’d on the post, and that is how the activity got its name. I don’t remember the event, only the way we referred to it. Of course, it could include other possible activities in addition to mere peeing, but you get the idea.

When we would stop at a motel for the night, my dad would say, “Well, it’s time to post the dog; see you soon.” And he would disappear out through the motel room door with the dog on its leash, and a few minutes later they would be back, with the dog having duly ‘posted.’ The same ritual would be repeated the next morning, before we got back into the car for the day.

One evening on this particular trip, when he announced what he was going to do, my sister spoke up and said, “Can I do it this time?” Nodding at the dog in case anyone didn’t realize what she was talking about.

There was a moment of stunned silence, and then my dad said, “Sure, why not?”

So Maurita (we had called her Rita from the day she was born, and would continue to do so for at least another ten years, but her real name was longer than that) took the leash, and the dog, and went out through the motel room door.

And minutes went by. And quarter hours. Finally, after about thirty minutes of waiting in vain for the pair to return, my dad got up from his overstuffed chair (yes, motel rooms had chairs in those days) and said, “What in the world? . . .” and went out the door. My mother and I followed him, because we were also concerned.

We were greeted with laughter, as about half of the other inhabitants of the motel for the evening were gathered outside their cabin doors, full of glee and pointing to a spot on the lawn where, yes, there was a young girl and a dog. And the young girl was pointing at a post, and saying to the dog, over and over again, “Post. . . . Post. . . . Post,” to no avail. The dog wasn’t taking the hint, if you could call such a forceful utterance a ‘hint.’ My dad took over the chore, and the rest of us went back inside, and soon the task was accomplished and dog and man returned.

But for days afterward, if anybody said the word ‘post,’ in any context, we dissolved in laughter. Except Rita, who found it very unfunny.

Having slightly misused a word, mistaking it for the command form of the verb, she felt obligated to come up with some new words, of her own invention. The first one of these that I remember, and still the most apropos, in my opinion, occurred one evening when we were returning from my Grandma’s cabin above Denver, back to her (and Aunt Eda’s) apartment at the San. In those days, the road east-bound in Turkey Creek Canyon emerged suddenly at a huge curve overlooking the city, well above the city but with a commanding view of its lights at night. We usually made this return trip in daylight, and the view was spectacular enough, even without the lights. But this particular evening it was well after dark, so the effect was miraculous. We all gasped, in unison, even though most of us had seen it before, but Rita was transfixed. (She was eight at the time.) “Oh!” she exclaimed. “It’s a choir-diamond!”

Our dad made fun of it, and our mom shot her a look that said she wondered about her offspring’s sanity, but I thought the expression was perfect. Yes, it did sparkle like a diamond, and, yes, there were so many lights at once, in perfect unison or some sort of ethereal chord, that ‘choir’ was certainly a reasonable analogy. But putting the two together, as a single hyphenated word, ‘choir-diamond’ was sheer spontaneous genius. It couldn’t have been said any better.

Nowadays there’s a new road there, much wider, and much higher up on the canyon wall, so that you see the lights in brief glimpses long before you get to any overlook, but at the time she said it, it fit.

The next one I remember was not a word, but a whole phrase. We were in the process of getting ready to move from Montrose to Grand Junction, and we were driving around our soon-to-be-new location, looking at houses, partly because we needed one, and partly just to get the feel of the place. Rita was nine. I was thirteen. On one of our circuits of the northwest part of the town, we entered a subdivision of large, almost palatial homes on quarter acre lots, much grander than anything we had yet seen. Not just in Grand Junction, but anywhere. The city had undergone a recent financial ‘boom,’ and this district was one of the results. People who had been as poor as we were most of their lives suddenly came into money, and they had been proud to show it. These houses were certainly out of our reach, but we continued to drive around, out of envy if nothing else.

I was in the back seat with our mom, and Rita was in the front passenger seat, with a great view. At one point she heaved a huge sigh and said, “How can people afford to be so rich?” It was a good question, and in the long run, when the Uranium boom died out, many of them couldn’t afford to be so rich. But it was a greatly-worded question all the same.

Like ‘post’ and ‘choir-diamond,’ this one stayed in the family lexicon for years. She was both ashamed and proud of the attention she received for these and other sayings she invented. I could go on, but those three examples will suffice for now. None of her verbal inventions were ever thought out in advance, or calculated to be ‘cute.’ These and all future ones were unconscious and spontaneous, which was part of the charm.

Next month will be the fourth anniversary of her passing. She had just gotten engaged, to a man from Hawaii, and they had just gotten back from her first-ever visit there, and they were planning how to make the move there, to live. I have no doubt that if she had lived to do it, she would have come up with some great ways to say how beautiful it was and still is.

I can only say, “How could a vocabulary be so rich?”

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