My Heart

To understand the love I have for my youngest sister is to go back to December 5, 1990, and understand that the sister I love deeply is the same sister that I thought was going to be my little brother. Kathrine, another one of my younger sisters, felt the same way. Kathrine was tired of having an older brother who didn’t want her coming to the playground to play ball or sit together and play Nintendo. The plan was for Andrea to never be Andrea, and in our adolescent heads, or our parents telling us we would have a younger brother, we were prepared to shower a little boy with all of the love, care and ice cream we could muster up.

Then we get to the hospital and my mom is holding a newborn girl. Safe to say, neither Kathrine nor I were happy and wanted absolutely nothing to do with the newest member of the family. Sharon was cool with it because now she had a younger sibling to play with. Marcia was cool with it because Andrea was healthy and she was smart enough to realize that was the most important thing. My eight-year-old eyes refused to look her way. I threw a fit at Denton Regional Medical Center, left the delivery room and sat right down in the waiting area. Eight-year-olds can’t drive, at least in America, so driving back to the house wasn’t an option. Instead, I fumed in a chair while everyone else celebrated the birth of my youngest sister.

However, the fury was short-lived. Once I finally looked at her, it was impossible not to fall in love with her and despite having three sisters already, it was settled right there and then, that Andrea was my favorite sister and my job was to be the best big brother she could ever have.

Unlike Kathrine and Sharon, my two other younger sisters, Andrea could roll with me anytime she wanted. If there was a game being played in the streets with my friends and she wanted to play, she played. It didn’t matter if my friends liked it or not, and she was so cool that they rarely, if ever, complained. When my cousins wanted to play Nintendo on one of the many weekends we had a full house, Andrea was allowed to play or we didn’t play at all. She was never a nuisance. She was never a pain in the ass, and that’s hard to say about a younger sibling. She was as close to perfect as a little kid could be. My sisters and I treated her like she was in bubble wrap. We wanted to make sure she never got a bruise on her leg from playing in the grass, or a scrape on her arm from diving on the concrete. The one time we did put her in a compromising position was the most terrified any of us ever had been and it was all over a game of tag.

Andrea had to be about two years old, no older than three. I was around ten years old, Kathrine was eight and Sharon was five. Once again, we let her play with us and she ended up being tagged. She chased us through the house and out to the front yard. At the time, my mom had this big-ass green Oldsmobile that sat in the front yard and doubled as a decent hiding spot. I opened the door and ran through the car first, Kathrine followed me and Sharon followed her. Once Sharon got through, I closed the passenger side door. Andrea followed Sharon and got through the driver's side only to find the passenger side closed. My dumb ass was already on the driver's side while she was in the car and I closed the door, so Andrea is trapped. We’re all laughing until we realized we trapped a three-year-old in an old-ass, hot-ass Olds, doors locked and no way for her to get out. Once we realized that, we all freaked out. Andrea trusted us with her life and was laughing the entire time until she saw the expressions on our faces. By that time, our faces had gone from uncontrollable laughter to sheer terror. She tried to open the door and couldn’t because the Olds didn’t have power locks, so she was stuck. She started to cry, we all began to panic and did our best to walk her through the steps of opening the manual lock on the driver’s side door to let herself out. Eventually, she got out and even though we laugh about it now, that was the last time we played tag. There are countless stories my older sister and younger sisters can tell about her, but the one thing we all agree on is the same way we viewed her back then when she was trapped in that Olds is the same way we view her now. She’s the purest person in my life and that has never changed.

Fast-forward to August 2000 and it’s time for me to move out of the house to go to college. I was only moving about 90 miles south from Denton to Corsicana, but it was the first time I would be away from Andrea since she was born. My parents pack up the car to drive me to school and Andrea comes with us. We get to Corsicana, and I get the chance to meet my future roommate, Ronard Patton, and it’s a blessing that he has sisters, because he understood what was coming. My parents unloaded the car and prepared to head back. Andrea’s not thinking that I’m staying in Corsicana. I guess she just thought I was moving my stuff and coming back home with her. Once I told her I was staying in Corsicana and she had to go home, she freaked out. She cried even louder than when was trapped in the Olds!

Normally, a young man about to enter college would be embarrassed by the sight of his little sister crying and saying she wants her brother to come home, but it wasn’t embarrassing at all. Her tears had me on the verge of packing my stuff back in the car, going home and enrolling at The University of North Texas since it was about ten minutes from the house, which would allow me to be with her every day while still going to college. Fortunately, my parents put her in the car and they drove off with me hearing her screams and visualizing her tears as I watched their car pull away from my dorm. After that, I went home every single weekend during my freshman year of college and hung out with her pretty much the entire time. When she had cheerleading tournaments in Oklahoma, she and I got in the car together, drove up there for the tournament, stopped and took pictures next to signs and landmarks on the way, and drove back. We didn’t need our parents. We needed their gas money, but we didn’t need them to take us. It was her and I against the world. Part of the reason I went to The University of Texas at Arlington after leaving Navarro is that the drive to Arlington was closer to my house than the drive to Navarro which meant I had more opportunities to hang with my baby sister.

Any decision I made was with her in mind. If I thought about doing something stupid, I thought about what would happen if Andrea found out. Would she still look at me the same? Would she think I was an idiot? She is the biggest reason I tried my best to stay out of trouble. To this day, she’s the biggest reason I try my best to stay out of trouble. Some people say they don’t want to let their parents down and while there’s a kernel of accuracy in that, I didn’t want to let my youngest sister down.

Fast-forward to 2014 and we had lived away from each other, off and on, for 14 years. At that time, Andrea had gone to college and graduated, but we still lived about an hour and a half drive apart. It was easy for us to see each other. That changed when she got an offer to move to Connecticut to work at ESPN. When she got the offer, my parents were in Zimbabwe. She wanted the job, which meant my sisters and I wanted the job, so we pooled our resources to get her ready for the move to Connecticut, all the while with my parents being out of the country. They pretty much sat back and figured it was on us to take care of our little sister, so we did. We didn’t ask them for money, for resources, for anything. The five of us put our heads together and the next thing you know, Andrea and I were on the road at 5 in the morning on July 31, 2014, en route to Connecticut.

She slept the majority of the trip, and as she did, I drove and snuck glances at her. My little sister had gone from sitting in the house watching SportsCenter with me in the mornings to going to work at ESPN. I started crying, just like she did when she dropped me off 14 years earlier and continued to do so, off and on, all the way to our destination. 24 years of memories flooded me on the 36 hours we were on the road together. I thought about her first pair of basketball shoes she ever owned, a pair of And1 Skip to my Lou’s due to her falling in love with the And 1 mixtapes from the late 90s. She would watch those videotapes over and over to the point where she watched them more than me and would throw a fit when I would turn them off to watch NBA games. I remembered coming back home on Friday nights to watch her cheer during her senior year of high school. There was the time she had a party at my parents’ house when they were out of town, only for me to come home unannounced that night. When I saw some of her friends were engaged in unsavory activities, I kicked all of them out of the house. It was Snoop Dogg's Gin and Juice video all over again when his parents went crazy for Snoop having all of his buddies in the house. She was embarrassed and pissed at me when it happened, but we laughed about it later.

All I could think about is how all of that was coming to an end. When she would wake up during the trip, I got it together so she wouldn’t see her big brother had been crying. We made small talk and told jokes and when she fell asleep again because she did a lot of sleeping and zero driving on that car ride to Connecticut, I’d remember more times we had together and start crying again.

Fast-forward to November 2018, also known as the worst period of my life. My dad passed away and I was in Zimbabwe preparing to bury the greatest man I ever knew. She showed up and we leaned on each other as only her and I could. I’ve never gotten over him being gone and have been in a funk ever since. The only thing that made me snap out of it was right after K-Lo, her now-husband, proposed to her, she asked me if I would walk her down the aisle to give her away. It wasn’t like I was going to say no, but that gave me a reason to get excited about being here again. It gave me a reason to keep going. The goal would be to get my little sister down the aisle and on December 31, 2019, she and I did what we’ve always done since day one: we got together and made the most with what we had.