Unlikely Twins by Barbara

As a young child growing up in Commerce Texas, I lived a dangerous neighborhood. There were two older mean boys and me. Their favorite game was Cowboys and Indians. Guess who was the Indian? Malcolm and Clarence were down right dangerous. The Cowboys would tie me to a telephone pole and leave me until they decided to come back, which was not nearly soon enough for me.

When I was five, my life changed for the better. Mary Lou came into my life. My aunt died and Mary Lou came to live with my father, mother, and me. She was also five. Our birthdays were only eleven days apart.

My mother got busy and had us dressed alike all the way down to our shoes. We had Buster Brown hair cuts which were square and generic. She called us the little girls. Little girls do this and little girls do that. Mary Lou was short and chubby with blond hair. I was tall and skinny with brown hair. Do I need to say more?

Shortly after she came, we put our heads together. We now had a level playing ground. We waited until Malcolm’s mother called him to come home for lunch. We sneaked up on Clarence and tied him to my father’s prized pecan tree. Some one must have untied him, because when we peeked out the window a half hour later, he was gone.

After this event, we became busy playing with each other and quit playing with them. There was heckling, of course, but we ignored it. Gradually they began to ask to play with us, and gradually we let them. There would be no tolerance of violence. Mostly we played with paper dolls cut from an old Sears Roebuck Catalog. Malcolm chose Menswear while Clarence, always the free spirit, chose the Fur Coats.
Looking back, Mary Lou and I felt that this story was an unlikely miracle performed by unlikely twins.

We stopped dressing alike when we were rebellious teenagers, but remain twins at heart at 86 years of age.

We all enjoyed this story in class. I'm sure you did, too. Barbara's memory of this early childhood event provided a variety of feelings. Humor. Hurt. More Humor. Sadness. Happiness. Satisfaction. And more humor. And that, folks, is what makes a great story.

NOTE:

The first photo has a great article on the twins in the photo.

The second photo is of a child who has a Buster Brown haircut. Guess who that kiddo is!
The third photo is a doll house sold out of a Sears Roebuck 1928 catalog which would be about the time Barbara and Mary Lou were six years old.

For all kinds of free paper-doll downloads, take a look at this fabulous site www.paperdolls.org/

Photo credit: HO/AFP/Getty Images, Daily UK News, Sears Roebuck.
Copyright © 2008 by The Write Workshop. All rights reserved.