StoryWorth: Moons of Jupiter
Apr. 26th, 2019 11:07 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lillibetDid you have a favorite planet as a child?
My elder sister is eighteen years older than I am. She went off to college the year I was born--in fact, my baptism was postponed until the day after Anne's graduation, because the grandparents were already planning to travel to us that weekend. So throughout my childhood she was an intermittent presence, coming home on the weekends and holidays with a suitcase full of laundry and marvelous stories to share.
That was also the period when she was establishing her independence from my parents, the tail end of the 1960s and into the 1970s, a very different time from the Great Depression, in which my parents' values were forged. There were a lot of conflicts. Anne would say something provocative--sometimes deliberately, but mostly not--and Mom would say something dismissive and Anne would snap at her and Dad would defend her and attempt, in his booming bass, to explain why she was wrong. It was awful.
Not that I was immune from this--our father was very loving, but also a passionate man, with a big voice, and not the world's largest supply of tact. It was easy to feel that he was yelling at us when he got the least bit heated in his delivery. Beckie tended to duck and cover when Dad got going, but Anne and I never mastered that trick.
When Anne saw that her exchanges with Dad, or his lectures and criticisms of either of us, were upsetting me, she took me aside and told me to think about Jupiter. "It's beautiful," she said, showing me pictures of the Great Red Spot in National Geographic, "and it has thirteen moons. Learn their names."
When I was about eight, I decided that I wanted to learn to play bridge. Beckie happily gave up the spot at the table she'd never wanted and I got to play whenever Anne hadn't brought along a friend or lover who, while being otherwise generally unacceptable to my parents, would always be welcome if they could make a fourth.
Io, Europa, Ganymede, Callisto...
My dad always wanted to be a teacher and loved lecturing, but was not a great instructor. His explanations tended to be far too complicated, with too much information thrown in all at once. And when his pupil became confused, or forgot a key point, he would become frustrated and critical.
Amalthea, Himalia, Elara...
I was a terrible bridge player. I've never had a head for strategy and despite an excellent memory I've never been able to keep track of what cards are played. Bidding made little sense to me, even at its most basic level, and if my father--with whom I was almost always paired--tried any of the more complicated codes he tried to teach me, I could never grasp how I was supposed to respond. I struggled through each hand, veering between utter confusion and abject boredom, neither of which made for good play.
Pasiphae, Sinope, Lysithea, Carme, Ananke, Leda...
Of course, Anne was no joy to play with, either. Stressed out by my parents' critical attitude, she would chainsmoke and snap through the hands. One of the worst moments came when it was my turn to be the "dummy" (the partner of the winning bidder, who turns their cards face up and lets the winner play both hands against the other pair) and Anne said, in something much like her Wicked Witch of the West voice (a staple terror of my childhood) "You're the dummy, dummy!" I burst into tears, ran from the table and hid. She was terribly sorry, it was all a joke, but I just couldn't see the humor in it then.
Themisto, Metis, Adrastea, Thebe...
There were thirteen moons when I started playing. By 1979 there were seventeen. That was something that always startled me, the idea that our schoolbooks could be wrong, that new information was always arriving. When my mother studied chemistry in the 1940s she had to learn the nine amino acids by heart, but by the time I reached ninth grade biology there were twenty-three and no one expected us to know them all. Today we've identified seventy-nine moons. That would have lasted through several rubbers, at least.
My elder sister is eighteen years older than I am. She went off to college the year I was born--in fact, my baptism was postponed until the day after Anne's graduation, because the grandparents were already planning to travel to us that weekend. So throughout my childhood she was an intermittent presence, coming home on the weekends and holidays with a suitcase full of laundry and marvelous stories to share.
That was also the period when she was establishing her independence from my parents, the tail end of the 1960s and into the 1970s, a very different time from the Great Depression, in which my parents' values were forged. There were a lot of conflicts. Anne would say something provocative--sometimes deliberately, but mostly not--and Mom would say something dismissive and Anne would snap at her and Dad would defend her and attempt, in his booming bass, to explain why she was wrong. It was awful.
Not that I was immune from this--our father was very loving, but also a passionate man, with a big voice, and not the world's largest supply of tact. It was easy to feel that he was yelling at us when he got the least bit heated in his delivery. Beckie tended to duck and cover when Dad got going, but Anne and I never mastered that trick.
When Anne saw that her exchanges with Dad, or his lectures and criticisms of either of us, were upsetting me, she took me aside and told me to think about Jupiter. "It's beautiful," she said, showing me pictures of the Great Red Spot in National Geographic, "and it has thirteen moons. Learn their names."
When I was about eight, I decided that I wanted to learn to play bridge. Beckie happily gave up the spot at the table she'd never wanted and I got to play whenever Anne hadn't brought along a friend or lover who, while being otherwise generally unacceptable to my parents, would always be welcome if they could make a fourth.
Io, Europa, Ganymede, Callisto...
My dad always wanted to be a teacher and loved lecturing, but was not a great instructor. His explanations tended to be far too complicated, with too much information thrown in all at once. And when his pupil became confused, or forgot a key point, he would become frustrated and critical.
Amalthea, Himalia, Elara...
I was a terrible bridge player. I've never had a head for strategy and despite an excellent memory I've never been able to keep track of what cards are played. Bidding made little sense to me, even at its most basic level, and if my father--with whom I was almost always paired--tried any of the more complicated codes he tried to teach me, I could never grasp how I was supposed to respond. I struggled through each hand, veering between utter confusion and abject boredom, neither of which made for good play.
Pasiphae, Sinope, Lysithea, Carme, Ananke, Leda...
Of course, Anne was no joy to play with, either. Stressed out by my parents' critical attitude, she would chainsmoke and snap through the hands. One of the worst moments came when it was my turn to be the "dummy" (the partner of the winning bidder, who turns their cards face up and lets the winner play both hands against the other pair) and Anne said, in something much like her Wicked Witch of the West voice (a staple terror of my childhood) "You're the dummy, dummy!" I burst into tears, ran from the table and hid. She was terribly sorry, it was all a joke, but I just couldn't see the humor in it then.
Themisto, Metis, Adrastea, Thebe...
There were thirteen moons when I started playing. By 1979 there were seventeen. That was something that always startled me, the idea that our schoolbooks could be wrong, that new information was always arriving. When my mother studied chemistry in the 1940s she had to learn the nine amino acids by heart, but by the time I reached ninth grade biology there were twenty-three and no one expected us to know them all. Today we've identified seventy-nine moons. That would have lasted through several rubbers, at least.
no subject
Date: 2019-04-27 03:51 am (UTC)I found this to be an adorable typo in this story. :)
My parents played bridge, I've caddied at bridge tournaments (oh, gods, the smoke back then), I'd be really good at bridge, but because my parents played bridge, I hate bridge.
Schoolbooks can be wrong, yes, and it's never good when they have inaccuracies, but schoolbooks are also frozen in time, and they taught me that if I knew that a fact presented in a schoolbook was inaccurate, and I knew that a recent discovery had made that fact that way, and looked at when it was published, well, then schoolbooks needed to be digested with an understanding of their place in time.
I really enjoy reading your StoryWorth entries. :)
no subject
Date: 2019-04-27 04:32 am (UTC)Glad you're enjoying these entries. It's interesting discovering my audience along the way--I think I'm writing them for Alice, but I may wait a while before letting her read them :)
no subject
Date: 2019-04-28 05:26 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-04-29 02:58 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-04-30 06:38 pm (UTC)