My beloved sister, Anne, who has always been there for me.
By John Murphy
Wednesday night in true pandemic version we gather on Zoom to celebrate one of the world’s newest septuagenarians – my sister, Sr. Anne Murphy.
Yes, Anne turns the Big 7-0.
I had to look up septuagenarian because I’m not yet one. My agony will come soon enough.
Anne has always been unique, as detailed in her grade-school autobiography, “From the Incubator to You.” A media darling early, she was also celebrated with a photo in the pages of the San Bruno Herald when treated with a local dentist’s new “painless” drill. I’m not sure how painless it was.
Anne was always a good soul, her being a nun and all. She loves children and animals and was charitable with me as a youth about playing board games and helping me with math. My extreme difficulty understanding an algebra problem about an albatross and a hummingbird was an inside joke for years.
Anne didn’t hold grudges. As a young boy I took umbrage at some imagined slight and responded by dumping a full bucket of water on her.
“Oh, you bad boy!” I can still hear my late father saying. I sprinted to the bathroom and locked myself in there until the heat was off.
One weekend night my mom went all out and made a huge pot of chili for dinner and Tollhouse cookies. I devoured a few bowls of the red and then went to work on the cookies. By now the sibs were gone and I had them all to myself and ate pretty much every last one of them.
This irked Anne upon her return and she really let me have it. Then the ground beef, tomato sauce, chocolate, sugar and cookie dough began percolating in my gut and the result was not pretty. I got sick several times as punishment, as if Anne’s rebuke wasn’t enough.
Anne entered the convent after high school but her influence – and some of her clothes — remained. So it was that a friend of mine who I’ll call Steve wound up attending a costume party in Anne’s Mercy High School uniform. Unforgettable was dad waking me in the middle of the night and exclaiming, “It’s 3 a.m. and Steve’s at the front door in your sister’s Mercy skirt and he’s bombed.” How does one respond to that?
So a lot of fun memories and some amusing anecdotes about Anne and loved ones, but what is this essay really about? Why, it’s about the albatross and the hummingbird, of course.
Main Street Dog 