The Indoorsman -- The joys of little brotherhood

My older sister is having a baby early next year, and she and her husband just found out it's going to be a boy.

I am happy for them, of course, but primarily I'm happy for that little boy. I'm happy for him because, as the first born in his family, he will never have to suffer the many indignities of having an older sister himself.

It's not that I don't love Kate; of course I do. She was the first born in our family and was just a shade younger than 2 when I burst onto the scene. So it was just the two of us for a couple of years before Tim and Anna arrived to make it a quartet.

We built forts, played in the woods, plotted elaborate run-away-from-home plans (foiled by our unwillingness to miss dinner). You could say we were partners in crime, although that's not really true. Kate and I were never really partners in crime. She was the crime boss and I was the henchman. I was expendable. I got all the dangerous missions.

When, for instance, Kate wanted to know if a person could really glide through the sky like Mary Poppins, she had me jump off the deck with an umbrella. (It won't surprise you to learn that I did not, in fact, glide through the sky. I fell straight down. I mean, straight down. In defiance of the laws of physics, the umbrella actually increased the velocity of my fall; I might as well have been holding a cinderblock.)

Still, that wasn't so bad. Maybe a scraped knee or a couple of bruises. Being the henchman was nothing compared to being the guinea pig. The following story, particularly the extant photographic evidence of it, is one of many reasons I can never run for political office.

When I was about 5 and she was about 7, my dear sister Kate dressed me up in a tutu and put a bunch of makeup on my face. By the time she was done, I looked like ... You know what? I was going to say I looked like Tammy Faye Bakker dressed as a ballerina-pirate, but that's kind of a played-out reference, so I'll just say I looked like a 5-year-old boy with a bunch of makeup and a tutu; that's both more accurate and more disturbing. To say that she did this for the express purpose of bringing the photos to school when she was a senior and I was in 10th grade would probably be giving 7-year-old her too much credit.

But that's what happened.

Anyway, it's easy to look back on that stuff now and just smile. It was never (too) malicious. I always knew Kate would stick up for me and be there for me when I needed her. As I would for her.

So, while I'm glad her first son won't have to deal with some of those embarrassments, I know he'll miss out on a few things, too. For instance, he'll never know the wonder a kid can feel when -- full of faith in his older, smarter sister -- he steps off a deck expecting, just for a split second, to fly.

-- The Indoorsman