Circle

Today my youngest niece turns 19. This is enough to make me feel older, but for once, I'm not actually thinking about my aging process.

I'm thinking instead about my sister.

Her 19th birthday on December 4, 1988 was a fun-filled party at my parents' house capped off by a midnight viewing of Tequila Sunrise with many of her closest friends. The party was great fun - I, being five years her junior, was allowed to invite a friend and the two of us enjoyed the music, food and gossiping about all of the older kids in the house. But over the entire party hung a cloud - barely noticeable during the times when laughter and Bon Jovi filled the room - but all too present in the split seconds of silence.

My sister chose a different path than a lot of recent high school graduates - although not so different from the paths chosen by many of her friends in the city of Virginia Beach where we grew up. She decided against college and instead chose to join the Air Force. As an Navy Jr. ROTC (Reserve Officer Training Corps.) student throughout her high school career in our military-infused area, she excelled in areas that made a good soldier and was recruited heavily by the armed forces. She chose the Air Force ultimately when her ASVAB results indicated that she would be suitable as a flight technician. She was going to work on planes!!

The day after she turned 19 my sister left for boot camp in Texas. The eight weeks went flew by and suddenly she was in training and just as suddenly she was shipped of for her first base assignment: Guam.

It was there, on that 15-by 30-mile snake-infested landing strip that my sister met a man almost twice her age, fell in love with him, learned she was pregnant with his child and married him. At 19. And I don't know if it was a combination of the military training, his influence and the awesome responsibility of being a parent, but the day my sister turned 19 was really the last day I knew her, really knew her like the little sister who shared the backseat of Toyota Corolla Tercel on many an eight-hour drives to Ohio. I imagine it happened instantaneously, because it hit me very suddenly that she had aged far beyond her years. And not in looks per se, although she began to suddenly eschew any type of style that reflected an awareness of pop culture and youth; she aged in attitude and mind. For her though, it may have been a process that took place over months - perhaps as her fetus aged, so did she. But it happened nonetheless. And she went from 19 to 40 and never looked back.

Or did she? I ask myself as I can't ask her. She can't see the transformation or doesn't want to, at least that's how I see it. I will likely never know, as she's become as foreign to me as the cash register operator at Wal Mart. She lives across the US from myself and my parents now. And she likes it. She calls my parents occasionally, and visits every few years. When we are together these days she acts still as if I am non-existent. As if I'm still that 14 year-old little sister that she said goodbye to on a December afternoon and forgot. My children, my life - they matter not to her - or at least that's what it seems to me. The forgotten little companion. I try to communicate, to reach out, to be a part of her new existence, but it's too hard to get in.

On this day, when I am proud of my beautiful niece who is a college freshman working to find herself in this world I wonder if her mother is right now thinking back to her own 19th birthday. And wondering where the time went.