starting point

I was humming half a song today, and just spent an hour skimming through CDs looking for it. Turns out it was a Mr. Miro cover of You Can Call Me Al*, and the out-of-context piece I was remembering probably would never be properly applied to the story I was thinking of.

A man walks down the street
It's a street in a strange world
Maybe it's the third world
Maybe it's his first time around
He doesn't speak the language
He holds no currency
He is a foreign man
He is surrounded by the sound
The sound
Cattle in the marketplace
Scatterlings and orphanages
He looks around, around
He sees angels in the architecture
Spinning in infinity
He says amen! and hallelujah!

I was 16, a junior in high school when my sister Linda started kindergarten. We attended a small school, with K-12 all in one building, so she and my sister Kim and I waited together for the bus in the mornings. Linda likes structure, likes to know what's coming ahead. She spent quite a bit of time that year asking questions about what would happen as she went through school, wanting the whole plan from her kindergarten class through graduation laid out in detail.

One morning, she asked me which grade I was in. I said "11th," and held up one finger beside her ten so she could see eleven. Her eyes got wide as she counted all the fingers, and then she looked at me and said, "How old are you?"

"Sixteen," says me. Linda was aghast, trying to compute the largeness of the number. I put up five more fingers, and we counted all sixteen before the bus came, at which point I thought the conversation was over.

Stupid assumption, really.

When I got on the bus that evening, Linda asked me to sit with her. Usually I liked to sit by myself, reading and staring out the window. She's a raging introvert, though, even more so than me, so learning to be in a class was stressful and she sometimes wanted to cuddle against me and sleep for the ride home. I'd wait until she went to sleep and rest my book on her head.

This particular day, though, she wanted to talk. I was midway through trying to take my jacket off without whapping her in the head when she asked me if I remembered when she was born. I mumbled out something affirmative, then told her how she was born on the day I was supposed to turn in a permission slip to sell Girl Scout cookies. I completely forgot to turn in the slip because I was so excited to have another baby sister, and my dad had to call the troop leader to explain my mistake.

She usually liked this story, even though she had heard it before. She loves hearing stories over and over, until she knows them as well as the original teller. This time around, though, it left her pensively staring at the back of the seat ahead of us. A mile down the road or so, she announced, "That's weird, that you remember before I was born."

My first reaction was confusion- of course I remembered before she was born, being the older sister. Trying to imagine people remembering before I was born, though, made me feel weird too. It's one thing to say Abraham Lincoln lived and died before I was born, but it feels different somehow to think of how much older family members than me remembered, things that I could never possibly remember because I wasn't alive yet. I have a starting point, a time before which I didn't exist.

Linda went to sleep a bit later, but I didn't get my book out. I sat and stared out the window, trying to imagine my own starting point.

I'm not really sure what 'You Can Call Me Al' is about. The verse I quoted, though, sounds like my realization that I have a starting point. It wasn't a strange world, before I got on the bus- I could have told you my birthday and what that meant. Sometimes, though, a wildly different angle on an idea runs over me, changing how I see so it feels like my first time down a street that I've been living on all along.

*Updated to reflect actual name of the song.