One Not Like the Other

It was October of 1999, and the world was getting ready to either turn a new millennium and century, or freaking out thinking that Y2K was going to shut down all of our computers and drop planes from the sky.  I wasn't really thinking about either of those, as I was a carefree two-year old who had no idea of how cruel and unpredictable the world was just yet.

But one thing was for sure, and that was that I had a little sister just entering the world.  Though I was originally supposed to stay with the cabin neighbors when Lydia was born, I ended up coming down with my parents, and being at St. Mary's in Duluth when it all happened.  Somewhere around my childhood home (not handy for this post sorry), one of us has a picture of all four of us together with my mother holding Lydia as she came into the world and me just sitting there all happy and smiling, my father standing off to the side with a calculating look as my sister was just getting acclimated to the world. 

"This is your baby sister" is what my mother told both of us she said on that day later down the road when we got older, and while that is true I never quite saw it that way.

Growing up in the middle of nowhere meant we did everything together, for we were some of the only children in the neighborhood.  We'd sled down the hill in the Winter and go swimming in the lake in the Summertime.  In between there were bonfires, rides around Eveleth and Virginia in our late father's truck, messing around in our torn apart house as it was being remodeled from 2005-09, and getting dragged along to multiple events.  My sister basically ended up being a Boy Scout at meetings for a little while, and I had the unfortunate misfortune of taking part in dance lessons.  More or less, we were inseparable.

Time has gone on and sometimes I'll joke with Lydia that she should go out and get a hit radio show, start a blog, or pick up the drum sticks and start jamming out as best as she can.  As two mature college students, we're able to laugh and joke that off as best we can.  But then I have to stop and tell myself something, that something being that my sister doesn't need to be an exact carbon copy of me.  Oftentimes I find that doing things together with Lydia is absolutely fun and exciting as she's ridden along for several DJ gigs and also appeared on Free Range Sports twice or three times (forgetting the exact number at the moment), so it's at least slightly natural to think that maybe we're supposed to become a pair of eccentric business people or something like that and truly work to make the world better.  I'm sure there might be some of you who are reading this and thinking that's how it should go too.  Well, it's not quite that way.

We do have our similarities.  Both of us attend college, work way too much for someone our age that's concurrently enrolled in school, and play a musical instrument or instruments.  But even on those subjects we have our differences.  Lydia attends a community college and I attend a four-year university.  I play the drums and some of the auxiliary percussion instruments while Lydia plays the saxophone, flute, and clarinet.  I work an entry-level management position in retail, and Lydia works an entry-level dining job. We both have big aspirations, but are stuck in the hellhole known as a college education.

Lydia and I are young though, and still have some time to make some of the more firm decisions in life as we both still have at least a year or two left of college before we have a degree that's worth a higher-end job that pays more than basic rent money.  In the meantime, we hope to keep being a source of encouragement for others while at the same time looking to build our own worlds and getting that footing. 

In 2013, we decided to take in two foreign exchange students, one from Azerbaijan and the other from Tunisia.  The girl from Azerbaijan ended up moving out after a few months, but the guy from Tunisia stayed, and has since became a second sibling to both of us.  In the first year that he was here, Walid Hdider showed us his culture and we did our damndest to show him ours, while at the same time seeing things that we hadn't seen in years or had never seen before.  We traveled to Michigan's Upper Peninsula, checked out a show at the Duluth Zeitgest Theater by our cabin neighbor Scott Johnson, and even saw what was in the woods north of Ely.  It was a beautiful year filled with so many cultural exchanges and also some new forever friends we met through the exchange student program from the Duluth Area.

Walid is also starkly different from Lydia and myself.  He has spent much of the past five to ten years being an activist, teaching multiple languages in multiple different countries, and also attending college in Denver.  More recently, he has been studying abroad in both Switzerland and France.  He really is going places and it has been awesome to see what he has put together.  To me, Walid is what we should be striving to be.  Not necessarily an around the globe activist, advocate, or teacher, but more of a "friendly global citizen", someone who is aware of their surroundings and sensitive to/open to trying the cultures of other people.  Personally, I really enjoy culture sharing, which is one of the reasons why I find Walid to be awesome.

So, while we may all have our differences, there is still one thing in common, and that is that we are all siblings and we all enjoy sharing our cultures and our stories with one another, laughing and joking all the way.  I'm separated from Lydia by about 230 miles of hills and lakes, and Walid is thousands of miles plus a full ocean East of me right now, but we still manage to keep in touch and congratulate each other on life's achievements and smaller successes, just as siblings should. 

Happy National Sibling Day to all the siblings out there.  Remember to call your brothers and/or sisters and see what they're up to in their lives.  I'm sure they'll appreciate the call.