I am imparting important life lessons, like the right way to think of your college experience and the essential but underrated art of choosing the correct exit from a subway station. There is something to this being an older brother thing, someone should write a book about how great big brother is. Shannon got in this morning and it couldn’t be more fun. It’s wonderful to have someone to show off the fact that, instead of knowing nothing about New York, I now know almost nothing. It’s equally wonderful to have someone who calls you out on that: “Oh, you’re such a New Yorker.”
When you get older everyone else gets older with you, even your younger sister. Shannon ate a Cambodian grilled cauliflower sandwich, and she loved it, and this was big deal. I’m not going to embarrass her (any further) by explaining why it’s a big deal, but trust me: It was a big deal. The fact is that younger iterations of her would have taken me up on my safety school offer of Pret A Manger, but no, onwards to Num Pang Sandwich we went.
This is about more than adventurous taste buds. It is the fact that everyone is constantly changing and shifting. It is the fact that the contorted shape shifting I have felt within me, over these weeks and across these years--that reconfiguring dance we sometimes call “internal growth” or other smarmy things--this is happening to everyone. And so it’s so easy to only know one single version of someone, out of the millions of possible permutations. But isn’t it magnificent, this idea that with family, with friends, you might have a chance to change with them, or at least close enough to notice what’s going on?
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