Cannot get links to appear on all pages

I’m using the defaut theme and had trouble getting the sidebar to appear on all pages and not just the homepage. I was successful in adding:

<?php get_sidebar(); ?>

to the single page code and making it the narrow view, now the sidebar appears, but only the top half, not the links.

I tried adding the get links code and they appeared but not in line with the rest of the sidebar. I also tried removing the single.php page entirely (first saving it to my desktop) in hopes that WP would automatically use my index format and that didn’t work (so I put the single.php page back).

I heard that there’s some programming in the default theme that only puts links on the index page. If this is so, is there a way to undo it, or is there something else I could do (I’d rather not change themes, I like how this one looks).

My blog: https://www.optative.net/blog/
A sample page: https://www.optative.net/blog/2008/12/05/bye-bye-giant-ad-hello-un-renovated-building/

thanks