The first of many years of being 29

The nicest thing my parents ever did for me was to give me a brother. One whose laid-back demeanour allowed me to boss him around. Who never pestered me when we had to share the back seat on long car rides, because he was too busy memorizing makes and models of every other car on the road. Who made my parents' anti-television laws bearable by being a great Lego architect. Who wasn't embarrassed to have a sister on his all-boys soccer team, and made a great lead singer in our band.


I sometimes resented his smallness and cuteness, since I was freakishly large and had terrible front teeth (he never needed braces; I had them twice). I still remember standing at either side of a door frame to be measured, he standing on tip toes, me scrunching down in hopes of denying the three inches I always seemed to grow. Until he started to catch up, and then it got competitive. At age 18 he passed the six foot mark and kept going, enabling him to eat twice the calories I could and not gain weight. I have never forgiven him for this. (Though his thinness is also due to admirable discipline and lots of biking and hockey.)

He quit a respectable engineering job because he had the sense to know it wasn't what he wanted, and has spent the past several years travelling all across North America with an auto-racing team. He seems to get eight times more things done in a day than I do, but still finds time to phone me on his lunch hours and make mix-CDs of all the great driving tunes I could want. Which makes it just a little easier to be living so far apart.

He's turning twenty-nine today. It's a very weird moment when you realise your little brother is almost thirty. I find that more shocking than being thirty myself. You probably won't be home to read this, bro, but happy birthday! I hope the year ahead is a great one.