Punk Rock Baby Turns 23

A very joyous 23rd birthday to my little sister, Dorkus Malorkus. Unfortunately, it seems like my gift and card to her are floating around the USPS system (we hope, at least), so she hasn’t received anything from me yet. Hopefully she will soon. She just moved and we’re hoping that the kinks in the system are working themselves out in her favor (eventually).

A funny Dorkus story, though, for your entertainment. When she was about five or six, Dorkus loved to climb my grandmother’s guava tree. She would clamber up, pick nearby ripe guavas and eat like fruit until it was time to come down for some picadillo or mole—whatever my grandparent’s helper/friend had made. I believe she also tried to get higher each time; this guava tree lent itself nicely to climbing, but the branches got weaker the higher you went, so there was a threshold that you couldn’t cross. Unless you were Dorkus, of course—she tried and would get up pretty high. She was a lithe and light little kid, so the branches held her up easily as she moved among them. For a while, at least.

One day, she tried too hard to get higher. While the rest of us were just ambling about my grandparent’s courtyard, we heard a woosh and a scream, then the sound of branches bouncing. Turning around at the first indication of this activity, we saw Dorkus flip backwards off the tree. She would’ve been sure to slam down on the concrete courtyard had it not been for her left leg catching between two fortuitously placed branches, essentially saving her, at best, a concussion. Her right leg, though, followed through with the momentum and shot her black, patent leather shoe off of her foot with force—it managed to clear the roof of my grandmother’s house.

While my mother lifted a stricken and silent (but on the verge of crying very loudly) Dorkus down from the tree, I pulled out my grandfather’s ladder and leaned it against the building, intent on finding the shoe. I hunted for a few minutes on the roof, but the shoe was gone. It had made its way to the next corral, where it was probably being stomped in some cow dung by the cow who dung’d it.

You would’ve thought that nearly braining herself on our grandparent’s concrete courtyard would’ve discouraged my sister from climbing the tree again, but she was right back at it the next day. Stubborn is as stubborn does—she’s kept on climbing, but in different ways.

Keep climbing higher and higher, Dorkus. We’ll be there when the branches get a bit creaky. Happy birthday, m’ija!