When you're the youngest by a wide margin, you get to hear about the totally separate life your family lived before you came along

I had no idea how to illustrate today's post, so I just went with this great photo of my son Jack taken many moons ago.

Today is my brother Mark's birthday, while this Saturday will be my sister Debbie's birthday. They are awesome siblings, and they deserve to have the best possible birthdays. So happy happy to my big bro and big sis!

I have mentioned here before that I am the youngest of four children. The gap between me and my next sib (Mark) is nearly 13 years. I came along relatively late in the game, as my mom was 37 and my dad 40 when I was born, which was pretty old for new parents in 1969.

You say "mistake." I say "pleasant surprise."

Anyway, this meant I would often hear stories about the days when Mom, Dad and the three kids lived in Park Forest, Illinois, then later in Euclid, Ohio (on good old Pasnow Avenue).

I never lived in either of those places. By the time I was born, we were firmly settled in Wickliffe on Harding Drive, where I lived the first 22 years of my life and where my mom lived for 57 years until she passed away.

The Park Forest and Euclid houses may as well have belonged to another family altogether. I have no connection to them, nor can I relate to the things I'm told happened in them.

It's like my parents and siblings lived a completely different existence in which I played no part at all.

Thus, I can readily relate to our youngest child, Jack. He constantly hears stories about our old house on East 300th Street, where Terry and I lived for the first 11 years of our marriage. All four of Jack's older siblings have memories of that house (though I wonder about Melanie, who wasn't even quite 3 years old when we moved out of the house).

To Jack, it's just a house on a street we often drive down. The other day he told me he has trouble even remembering exactly which house was ours.

And why should he remember? He never lived there. It's a place to which he has no attachment at all.

Yet it's also a place where we as a family – well, six of us anyway – made many lasting memories. It was the first house Terry and I owned, the place to which we brought home four newborns, and the place where we celebrated many other firsts and milestones.

It's a house full of happy memories...memories that necessarily exclude Jack, much like those old homes in Park Forest and Euclid do for me.

The silver lining in all of this? As the youngest, you often get spoiled rotten. You get everything your older sibs never got.

On balance, I still think Jack and I got the better end of the deal.