Your rep is toast...

memories of my sister kathy
My sister Kathy died two weeks ago. Bone cancer. She was fifty-six. This and two small comments made by my husband and daughter prompt me to write. A few days after I got home from the funeral in Kentucky (more about that someday), Mike came into the dining room, where we camp out with our computers, and said, "Didn't your father say he was going to write his memoirs sometime?" My father has been dead for years so I don't know what it is that made him think of it, but it made me remember that Dad always wanted to do it. I remember seeing some pages he wrote when we were at his house one of those last times. And earlier--before he died--he had hinted that he was going to tape some stories, but if he did, we never found them.

And just the other day, Liz asked me (I think while we were waiting for a table at a restaurant) if I ever thought of writing my memoirs. I confess it smacked of family conspiracy to get-mom-away-from-that HP-fanfic-obsession. (I was sort of waiting for my son Joe to start dropping hints too, but we're on very different schedules, so it would be hard for him to casually drop a line about it as he'd pass me in the hall on his way to bed after night-shifting at Martins.) But the more I thought about it, and the more I thought about my dead sister, the more it made sense. So I'll start--with Kathy.

But first some background. I'm from a family of seven kids. Catholic, lower to middle class. (In those days it didn't take so much money to have a decent life, so I'm not sure where the sociologists would put us today.) Mom (Kathleen Ann--nee McGlone) and Dad (Francis Joseph Snyder--'Snitz' to his buddies)were from Baltimore. They married late (in their late twenties) and moved as soon as they had the wherewith to Parkville, northeast, just over the city line. To give you an idea of the timeline, my oldest sister Betty was born in 1938 (?) and my youngest brother Joe in 1953 (?). That puts me square in the middle (1945--this I'm sure of). Frank and Al (rechristened by Dad 'Butch' and 'Spike', respectively) filled in between me and Betty, and Sally and Kathy came after me and before Joe. There are approximately two years between each of us, except for two gaps-between Al and me and between Kathy and Joe, which someone (Betty I think, who was a nurse, so she had God's permission to think about stuff like that) postulated were years when Mom may have had miscarriages. But you never talked about 'female problems' back then, so we don't really know. Likewise we have to guess that Mom and Dad used the 'rhythm method' to space the births so well, Mom being an Irish Catholic--which means no artificial birth control--none whatsoever--and it's a sin to even talk about it. That or they only had sex about nine times in their married life--which would fit with Mom's very chaste nature, but not with Dad's more forward one, I think.

Kathy was the youngest daughter, born in June 25, 1950, the first anniversary of the start of the Korean War. Is that right, you historians and poly-sci majors out there? If so, it has to be more than just coincidence because she was always a feisty kid--sort of the MacArthur or maybe the Truman of the Snyder family. ('I shall return',and 'The buck stops here' and all that.) But the Truman part--shouldering responsibility--was slow in developing. As a little person, she was much into ratting us older kids out. My sister Sally reminded me after the funeral that Al had early on nicknamed her 'Ratter Swink'. (I don't know where the second part of the name came from, but it was probably associated with sports in some way. But more on that later.)

Got to go. People are waking up, and I have a coffee cake in the oven.

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