nothing tragic.

One of my coworkers was making small talk back when I first started at the company. He asked when my birthday was, and I told him that it was in late October. He then asked if I had been forced to wait an extra year to go to school because I didn't turn five until the end of the month. I thought it was a really odd question. Most people make some sort of Halloween comment when I tell them my birthday. Turns out his kid was going to turn five this year, right after the cut-off for starting kindergarten. He was worried that being made to start school would adversely affect his child.

Not to worry, I said. I'm sure it affected me, but nothing tragic.

The funny thing is, I knew exactly what he was talking about as soon as he said it. I did have to wait an extra year, and I remember it being an issue. I don't think it was so much a problem for me - I didn't care. But I remember my mother explaining to me that to start kindergarten in the fall of 1987, you had to turn five by October 15 of that year. I would not turn five until October 30. Two weeks. Maybe my mother was put out by the inconvenience of having to keep me around the house for another year. It did seem stupid to miss it by only fifteen days, but the school system has to set a firm date somewhere, and I suppose that's where it landed.

So I started school in the fall of 1988, almost six years old. Ever since my coworker asked me how the extra year has affected me, I've been thinking of all the ways. The answer I should have told him is no, I've never been able to tell any adverse effects, but yes, it will affect your child's life in ways that you will never know. Of course, there's no way to know every difference - perhaps I would've been killed in a class field trip or won some sort of lottery only available to children born before October 15, 1982. It's a massive game of "What if?" where you don't think about that promotion you didn't get or that girl you rear-ended, but you start at the very beginning with something as basic as your birthdate.

This isn't the first time this idea has occurred to me. I used to be very glad that I waited a year to start school, because I didn't like a lot of the people in the class ahead of me. Also, it was always really cool to be older than everyone else. I hit all the major rite of passage ages before all my friends: 13, 16, 18, 21. Then I hit 22, and I realized that 21 was probably the last age when it was cooler to be older. When I hit 30, I'm going to look around at all my 29 year old friends and wish I'd been born a couple of weeks earlier so that I'd be hanging out with older people. Or maybe I should just start hanging out with some older people before then.

But now I realize there was a lot more to it than being able to tell a friend that being seven was so passe when she finally reached it months after I did. In high school, I might not have gotten the same scholarship opportunities that I got, because the graduating class ahead of mine had two very ambitious students that worked the system better than I would have thought possible, and I worked it pretty darn well. I might not have gone to Appalachian. That's a toss-up, depending on whether I would've been serious enough about my relationship with Casey to follow him to school, given that he and I even got together in the first place. Even if I had gone to ASU, I probably would not have ended up with a job in Winston. I know the guy they hired at the end of what would have been my graduating year, and I'm thinking he would've beaten me out for the job.

But the difference I think about most are the people. The people surrounding you make such a huge difference just by being a part of your life. They influence your decisions, both the daily ones of what movie you watch that night and the major ones, like where you go to college. Plus, I know some really amazing people, and I have to think that they are way better than anyone I would have met in the life of the Sandra that was born before the fifteenth of October. I look down my buddy list, and I can check all but a few as being people that I only know because I was born two weeks "too late."

Granted, I realize that I would simply have a different group of friends that I would probably like very much, but that's not the point. These are my friends, and I want to keep them. My grade school and high school set would be completely different. I would not have my college roommates, all my ex-coworkers, my friends from all those high school summer programs. And yes, I would still have college roommates and ex-coworkers and old high school buddies, but they would be a completely different set of people. And true, I'd never know the difference, but I look at those friends of mine, and I am nothing but relieved that I decided to hang out in the uterus for a couple more weeks.

Those are only the differences that are obvious. Things like where you went to college and where you get your first job, those are the major crossroads where it's clear to you that one path is very different from another. Differences like the fact that I wouldn't have gotten the chicken pox from that kid in my kindergarten class - who can tell how much or little effect that may have had on me? Everything affects everything, and it is only by a very long series of events and choices and chances that I have ended up as this person sitting where I sit. Ending up this girl right here was very unlikely, though just as likely as any of the billion other girls I could've turned out to be. So that alternate Sandra, that one who is two weeks older than I am, she may have my eyes and my mother's thighs, but she is somewhere completely different, and she is someone else.

All of this struck me hard while I was standing in Josh's kitchen, which I was only doing because I had been born two weeks too late. Otherwise I wouldn't be in Winston, I wouldn't know Josh. I wouldn't be standing in his kitchen, eating pancakes and bacon, unwinding from a long day of packaging installs, wearing that green shirt with those jeans, sporting those Buddy Holly glasses, and thinking about the importance of fifteen days, because I would be someone else. I asked him, "Did you know that if I had been born a couple of weeks earlier, we never would have met?" He flipped a pancake, shook his head and smiled at me as he answered, "That would have been tragic."