When you're the youngest by a wide margin, you get to hear about the totally separate life your family lived before you came along

I had no idea how to illustrate today's post, so I just went with this great photo of my son Jack taken many moons ago.

Today is my brother Mark's birthday, while this Saturday will be my sister Debbie's birthday. They are awesome siblings, and they deserve to have the best possible birthdays. So happy happy to my big bro and big sis!

I have mentioned here before that I am the youngest of four children. The gap between me and my next sib (Mark) is nearly 13 years. I came along relatively late in the game, as my mom was 37 and my dad 40 when I was born, which was pretty old for new parents in 1969.

You say "mistake." I say "pleasant surprise."

Anyway, this meant I would often hear stories about the days when Mom, Dad and the three kids lived in Park Forest, Illinois, then later in Euclid, Ohio (on good old Pasnow Avenue).

I never lived in either of those places. By the time I was born, we were firmly settled in Wickliffe on Harding Drive, where I lived the first 22 years of my life and where my mom lived for 57 years until she passed away.

The Park Forest and Euclid houses may as well have belonged to another family altogether. I have no connection to them, nor can I relate to the things I'm told happened in them.

It's like my parents and siblings lived a completely different existence in which I played no part at all.

Thus, I can readily relate to our youngest child, Jack. He constantly hears stories about our old house on East 300th Street, where Terry and I lived for the first 11 years of our marriage. All four of Jack's older siblings have memories of that house (though I wonder about Melanie, who wasn't even quite 3 years old when we moved out of the house).

To Jack, it's just a house on a street we often drive down. The other day he told me he has trouble even remembering exactly which house was ours.

And why should he remember? He never lived there. It's a place to which he has no attachment at all.

Yet it's also a place where we as a family – well, six of us anyway – made many lasting memories. It was the first house Terry and I owned, the place to which we brought home four newborns, and the place where we celebrated many other firsts and milestones.

It's a house full of happy memories...memories that necessarily exclude Jack, much like those old homes in Park Forest and Euclid do for me.

The silver lining in all of this? As the youngest, you often get spoiled rotten. You get everything your older sibs never got.

On balance, I still think Jack and I got the better end of the deal. 

The years pass so quickly...yet sometimes they don't

A woman at our church recently celebrated her 102nd birthday. If she's still around a couple of years from now, she will probably have fairly clear memories of events that happened a full century ago.

This is mind boggling.

Then again, almost everything about the passage of time amazes me. It's like that saying "the days are long but the years are short."

Individual days don't exactly pass slowly for me, but they feel every bit as long as they are (if that makes sense). This is probably because I'm still in the slog of daily work and routine. Often the span of time from 8 in the morning until 5 in the afternoon feels like a week.

I may have a different mindset in, say, 15 years when I hope to be retired. At that point, as I approach my 70s, those same days and weeks will probably fly by with distressing swiftness.

Right now what flies by are the years. Without looking at a calendar, my sense is that it's 2013. Maybe 2015. There's no way it's 2024. It just can't be.

And yet it is.

It feels like I was just in my mid- to late 40s, but my birth certificate confirms I've crossed the line into my mid-50s.

My parents are gone and so is one of my siblings. Others I've known and loved have also passed on. Life is so different from what it used to be, if only because the cast of characters around me has turned over so much.

Then there's this little bit of additional weirdity: While the year 2000 feels like a long time ago, 1980 doesn't at all. Twenty years ago seems like a lifetime, but 40 years ago has a "just yesterday" quality to it.

How? Why? What is it about our memories and our sense of time that starts to turn upside down the older we get?

I can't explain any of it. The only thing I can do, I figure, is to live as much in the here and now as possible and let the chips fall where they may.

I may not live to 102, but if I can shift my mindset to be more present-focused, I can make the most of whatever time I do have.

And maybe feel a little more stable when it comes to passing years and the memory of what once was.

Seriously, though, Reagan is still president, right?

Having (considerably) older siblings

This week my brother Mark and sister Debbie have birthdays (Deb's is actually today). They are two years apart, but they have always shared a birthday week.

I will not tell you how old they are, though I will say the age difference between us can be measured in double-digit years.

I will also add that, when I was born in November 1969, my oldest sister Judi was in her junior year of high school and was only 3 1/2 months from turning 17.

While not exactly rare, it is uncommon nowadays for a 17-year-old to have a newborn baby brother. Trust me when I say it was even more uncommon in 1969.

As the story goes, my siblings found out my mom was pregnant not from Mom herself, but from our Aunt Peg. I don't know if Mom was unsure how they would react or what, but I'm told they were all pretty thrilled by the idea of having a little brother or sister.

There was a time when all six of us lived in a 900-square-foot house with no upstairs, no basement, and only one bathroom. I don't remember that time because it all happened during the first two years of my life, but having spent 22 years in that same house myself, I can imagine how chaotic it must have been.

By the time I was in kindergarten, Judi and Mark were both married (he would later join the Air Force and spend several years overseas). And while Debbie technically lived with us, I don't remember seeing her all that much.

I always say I was essentially raised an only child, even though I'm the youngest of four.

As often happens as we age, I'm much closer to Debbie and Mark now than I ever was as a kid (and I was close to Judi before she passed away). We don't see each other as often as I might like, though Debbie cuts my hair every two weeks and, as of this writing, Mark and I were planning to take in a baseball game together this week.

All the same, I hope this is the happiest of birthday weeks for my brother and sister. My much, much older brother and sister.