February 27, 2002
  birthday

It seems like everybody is having birthdays this month, the most significant amongst them being my sister and Flamingo. Cameron's birthday is past, but Masako's is today, and she'll be ___ years old.

Should it worry me that I don't know how old my sister is? In my own defense, she doesn't know either. For that matter, she's rather dubious of the date that's listed on my driver's certificate. "Did you lie?" she asked me once, suspiciously. I rely on the Guy and Tara to give me accurate assessments about my tally in years. The Guy goes one step further and provides me with what I can only guess are reasonable numbers for my sister's age as well.

My sister and I once utterly infuriated some friends she'd made in a summer camp in Indiana. I was in Aspen at the time, enrolled in the very expensive (and musically useless) high school summer camp attached to the yearly Aspen Music Festival.

She called me, a pre-scheduled connection that took place on pay phones in our respective dormitories. Before we'd left home, my mother was very earnest about pressing phone cards into our hands, completely oblivious to the temptation for abuse that it would present to normal, proto-typical American teenagers. Since neither of us were normal or proto-typical, -- me with my paranoid fear of all handsets, my sister with her not-unreasonable conviction that the government might be listening -- we managed to resist the urge to exploit her financial generosity.

Most summers we spent travelling, because of my parents' work. They were -- my mother still is -- violin teachers, and they would get invited to teach at workshops all over the US, Canada, and Japan. Once in a while, I would spend my summers somewhere else, in a music festival where I wouldn't be an irritating faculty daughter.

Anyway, Masako and I hooked up on the phone and chatted for a while. Nothing exciting, because I was a teenager, and she was just barely one herself, so there wasn't all that much conversation to be held. We were both too cool to be excited about talking to a mere sister. The interesting point of this story took place after we had most of our main conversation.

"Here," she told me. "My friend wants to talk to you."

She passed the telephone over to some boy she had made friends with in Indiana. I don't remember his name. In fact, the only reason he's important is because he's part of the story and there's a point to all this.

So, anyway, he got on the phone.

"Hi," he said. No introductions. "Is this Masako's sister?"

"Yes," said I.

"How old is she?"

There was a moment of blank silence. Out of all personal questions that a body can be asked, "How old is so-and-so" is the top on our family's all-time least favorite questions, in any permutation. "How old is so-and-so" is equal, in our minds, to "how old are you?" Both questions are unanswerable, because we honestly never know. What's even worse is that they inevitably lead to the follow-up, which is usually, "What do you mean, you don't know? When was so-and-so born? How can you not know?"

"I don't know," I said.

There was a momentary pause. Then he started yelling at me. "What do you mean, you don't know? When was she born? How can you not know?"

"Sometime in September," I said, vaguely. "Or maybe February. Or August. One of those three."

"What kind of a sister are you?" he demanded.

My feelings were hurt. "I don't see why I should know her age if she doesn't know mine," I sulked. "No, I think her birthday really is in February. I'm almost positive."

"Masako!" he called. "How old's your sister?"

And I heard her answer distinctly: "I don't know."

"You're kidding, right? I mean, this is a joke, right? How old is she?"

At that point, my sister attempted to regain control over the telephone; I heard her remonstrating with her friend, then some thumping, and then I was speaking to my sister again.

He was yelling in the background.

"I think your friend is upset," I said, perceptive as ever.

"Weird," she sighed. "He's all mad at us now. He says you're a terrible sister."

"For not knowing how old you are?" I asked, incredulous.

"Men."

Okay, so maybe there wasn't a point to the story. However, it was a sister story, and it was about age, and that's really all there is to it.

Happy birthday, Masako!