A word of advice: when you're twelve and decide to throw an impromptu Christmas piano recital, do not have your dad record it. I was that boy, donning my Santa hat in front of my parents, grandparents, aunt, and baby sister, announcing with a slight tremor to my father's new hand-held camera, "Uh, good afternoon ladies and gentleman. Thank you for being here... in our living room... tonight..." I was that boy, acne-ridden, glasses slipping off my nose, destined to be one of the first viral failures -- even in the age of no YouTube. I was that boy.
Thank God for my baby sister. One song and a platter of polite applause later, she began wailing, gesticulating with her pudgy arms toward the piano. Back then I begrudgingly conceded to her, not realizing that what she was actually doing was saving me from unmitigated humiliation. Taking a backseat on the couch, I watched as my sister sat on my mother's lap at the piano, screaming and smacking her palms against the keys with a kind of fiery gusto unheard of and unseen in my previous performances. White or black, high or low, melody or no melody, it didn't matter: my sister was a star. For what seemed like the rest of the night, she slammed those keys in her fugue, happy tantrum state, shrieking at the top of her lungs and basking in the applause. By the end of her performance, we were on our feet. Was it beginner's luck? A Christmas miracle? Whatever it was, it remains to this day my favorite memory of her.
Not that I don't have favorite memories leading up to my present-day sister, who is now the same age as I was when I threw that ill-fated recital. There was her first birthday party at The Little Gym, how excited she was on the car ride there and how shy she turned when so many friends showed up. Or her varying, escalating obsessions: from Dora the Explorer to High School Musical to Justin Bieber to -- and I write this with a heavy, old man sigh -- One Direction. And I'll never forget the day I became the cool brother, when she felt comfortable enough to tell me about boys at school who had crushes on her. (Fortunately, she wasn't interested in any of them. In a way I felt proud, getting to the point where I could be worried about things like that.)
But here's the thing about memories: you gotta be there.
Because what happened to me after high school is what happens to millions of high schools students every year: I left. My sister had just gotten braces, and I left. After nearly eighteen years in Texas, I moved to Chicago to attend college, and my new memories of my sister were limited to summer and winter break visits. I still pretended to be a chauffeur while driving her to ballet practice, still shared with her delicious snow cones that painted our palms red, still perfected our ridiculously complicated handshakes; the memories were still there, accumulating -- but barely. For every new memory that I gained, I missed out on fifty others. What was the expression on my sister's face when she finally strapped in those point shoes? Do our parents let her eat snow cones in the winter? Who was there to give her an awesome handshake on her birthday? I haven't been home for her birthday in five years.
It doesn't get any easier after college, either. I'm convinced the concept of vacation days are just a way to make employees forget that, aside from two or three weeks a year, we spend every day either at work or resting until we have to work again. (Focus on the positive: vacation days.) It's inevitable, it's a passage of life that many take, but what I didn't anticipate was that the working life would put a price on making memories. You want to go home and spend time with your family? It costs you four vacation days. Instead, you think about that trip to Europe you'd always wanted to take. You perform a cost/benefit analysis in your head. You decide: well, Vegas is worth it. Watching your sister in her best Nutcracker role yet isn't.
Is this how it goes from here?
A couple of weeks ago, my family visited me in Connecticut, where I work an 8:30 to 6:30 office job. Whenever I'd gone home before they would always comment on how I'd changed -- "You seem sickly. Are you sick?" -- but after not seeing my family for half a year, I began to notice for the first time how they had changed. My mother still looked like she was in her early thirties, but also dressed like it now. I could count the strands of hair on my father's head. And my sister. My little sister was a bona fide teenager. She knew all the curse words, had a better grasp on pop culture than me, and had amassed more than 700 followers on Instagram. There was a stage between that girl who rejected her crushes and the girl who now pined for boys. I missed that stage. There's nothing to remember about it now.
So after a week of touristy activities in New York City, I hugged my sister goodbye (without having to bend down) and my family went back to Texas. I'd just learned how to do my own taxes, and my family left me. Perhaps this is what startles us after living a quarter of the whole shebang: we're so used to leaving others. The homes that we grew up in were never meant to be permanent. But now that we're starting a journey of forming our own homes, we will, at some point, be done leaving. That's when people begin to leave us, and we become the memory.