To Sarah Jean on her Fiftieth

I tell people I'm from Canada and I always get the same reaction: they nod their heads and smile like the parents of children who have just told them the same knock-knock joke they've been repeating all day.

Being from Canada is both an explanation and a definition: it puts past experience into context and defines terms by their absence.

By convention, we are known as a polite and generous people. We might correct Americans on their spelling of “Drive-Thru” or “While-U-Wait,” but we'll feel badly about it.. As a people, we're like Siri on your iPhone: we speak when we're spoken to, come when called, but we don't always understand your meaning. We're always in the background and, for the most part, are like those guys that you see at the circus that follow around behind the elephants: invisibly efficient and only causing a stink when we are no longer there.

That's the accepted view, the normative view, the baseline.

But, just like those circus guys, you only really understand what it means to be Canadian by the exceptions, the outliers, the deviants.

The global notion of the polite Canadian is reinforced by the news of Justin Bieber's egg-based attack on his neighbor's home. The reserved Canadian is never more keenly appreciated then by watching Howie Mandel on “America's Got Talent.” The welcoming and generosity of the Canadian people was never more clearly on display than in the words and deeds of the “Stephen Harper Government” (All rights reserved.)

My sister is also a deviant.

Sarah is now, and has always been, what is talked about in business terms as a “disruptor.” In fact, my first recollection of her involved her disrupting my lunch.

In September of 1966, I was five-years-old and just starting kindergarten. After a busy morning of naps, stories and fun with mucilage, I had walked home for lunch and the welcome prospect of another nap. (Five years old and I already had a schedule.)

My brother Andrew and I were eating lunch when my parents came home from the hospital...with a girl.

A girl?

Before that, it had been just my brother and me. We were like Yin and Yang, black and white; completely binary, like one and zero, on and off. My brother was always on me and I was always trying to get him off.

After that fateful lunch, I would still call out for someone to get him off of me, but now, with a girl in the house, I had to take a number. I was now no longer the only one making noise and such calls were no longer being answered in the order they were received.

I was quick to recognize how unfair this was and slow to appreciate that it was never going to change.

For a while, I had hoped the arrival of a younger sibling would give me a chance to pay forward some of the lessons that my brother had felt it so important to teach me, but, despite providing many opportunities—teachable moments—my sister and, more importantly, my parents showed less than no interest in wrestling, or judo, or any of the other martial arts that my brother had been allowed to “teach” me; and, somehow, this made me the bad guy?

What was that about?

And there were even more disruptions to come.

Like she has done in so many other situations throughout her life, from the very beginning, no sooner did she show up then Sarah seemed to be taking over.

Everything was suddenly all about her.

Don't make too much noise, or you'll wake her up; stop doing whatever it is you're doing because she needs to sleep.

It's no longer fashionable, but when I was growing up, I was told that if somebody hit me, I was supposed to hit them back, so I'm thinking okay. My bother hits me, I'm supposed to hit him back.

No problem.

But, when Sarah hit me..., big problem.

And then, because of her, we had to move out of our bedroom.

For the better part of ten years, Andrew and I shared a bedroom right next to our parents. It wasn't much, but it was ours. It had a built-in desk, a pretty good-sized closet, bunk beds and James Bond-inspired wallpaper.

It was the boys' room.

And then, it became the girl's room.

For some reason, my brother and I still had to share, but Sarah suddenly got to jump the line and get her own room.

Because of her, we not only had to leave our room, we had to leave our floor. No longer welcome “on deck,” Andrew and I were sent to the basement. When we lived on the same floor, we got called for dinner, but once in the basement, conversation was out and communication was reduced to a series of thumps on the floor.

A slight advance on this was made with the introduction of an intercom that was connected to our parents' bedroom, but even then, it only worked if they wanted to talk to us and never if we wanted to call them.

Lots of changes, more disruptions.

And girls are like potato chips, there is never only just one.

Early on, Sarah distinguished herself by having something that Andrew and I have to different and much lesser degrees: social skills.

Whereas we are collectors of things—not “hoarders”, it only looks that way—Sarah was, and is, a collector of people. At various times, Andrew and I collected comic books, baseball cards, Hot Wheels, while Sarah collected Janets and Andreas and Jennifers and Tiggys and a host of other given names too difficult to keep track of.

As soon as she was able, Sarah was always on the move. She was always at a friend's house, or at camp, or at ballet class. Andrew and I had been taught that “children should be seen and not heard.” It was a rule we had trouble keeping. For Sarah, this was never a problem because it seemed like she was never home.

My recollections of growing up with her are something of a blur and seem to go pretty quickly from struggling to understand what was this creature that my parents had visited upon us who seemingly never had to play by the same set of rules, to wondering where she was off to this time, to, quite frankly, being awestruck at all of the opportunities that she was able to make happen for herself.

My favorite story about her is when my wife Kristen and I went to visit her at her office. We noticed—I don't remember now if it was Kristen or me—a piece of fabric in her hair and she told us how, the prior weekend, she had been visiting friends at—I'm going to say “Magog”--and had somehow fallen out of a boat and struck her head. The piece of fabric, it turns out, was a bandage. (Stitches may have been involved?) It may have been residual head trauma, but she tossed off the event like it was nothing and off we went to lunch. On the way to the elevator, one of her co-workers complimented her on her choice in hair accessories and, once in the elevator, another spent the entire car ride flirting with her.

Only my sister could make an injury look attractive.

That is perhaps the best example I have of how she is less the product of her environment, an incremental improvement on what came before, i.e., me, but something else, something entirely new.

She is a disruption; in fact, the very definition of the word.

She is an unbelievably warm and generous person with a keen interest in people. She's sensitive and fragile and easily overcome by emotion, but she is also fiery and resolute and devoted to her friends.

My sister is, like Canada itself, most clearly defined by her absence and the vacuum she leaves when she is no longer there.

And I'm not the only one who knows this about her. I can't be.

We wouldn't be gathering around the warm binary glow of the Internet at points all over the world to raise a glass in her honor were it not to acknowledge the profound disruption that she has made and continues to make.

I have absolutely no recollection of the lunch I was eating the day my sister came home, but I remember the day and I know how it changed my life. Can it really be that fifty years have passed?

It doesn't seem like it.

Not at all.

What it seems like, is prologue; like the exposition that you have to get out of the way before the story can really begin and I, for one, cannot wait to see what happens next.