I only found out on my tenth birthday that I had to wait three more years to be a teenager. Up to the age of nine years, 365 days, 23 hours, 59 minutes and 59 seconds (it was a leap year the year I turned ten) I thought teen just meant double digits. But apparently they set up a system where some of the double digit numbers had the suffix -teen in their names, and ten, eleven, and twelve were not them, and you had to have the suffix –teen in your age to be an actual teenager.

I can still hear my infuriating older brother George informing me of this at 12:01 a.m. on the very morning I turned ten. Maybe 12:05. He was 3 1/2 years older and so of course knew everything. Though why he couldn’t have mentioned this little factoid earlier—well I guess it never came up, now that I think of it, till I stayed up all the way till midnight on the eve of and someone asked why and finally at the stroke of midnight when I was no longer of a single-digit age I didn’t mind answering them. I still have not recovered fully from this disappointment, in fact. What I decided then and there, though, was that I wouldn’t press the point or tell anyone that I knew everything three years ahead of schedule, that’s all.

Amazingly, over the next three years, I learned a lot of new stuff. Even more incredibly, this process continued into my teen years and beyond—to this very day, in fact. So the notion that by becoming a teenager you know everything there is to know, or everything worth knowing, at any rate, may be an old wives’ tale, that is, not true at all.

However, when nephews or neighbors or progeny of pals have had their thirteenth birthday and I have been invited to the festivities, I remember turning ten and later thirteen and how much it meant to me, so I usually ask the birthday boy, “Now that you’re thirteen, you know everything, hunh?” just so the kid knows what’s expected of him in case he doesn’t yet. I find it more fun this way, plus it invariably infuriates the parents just enough on the birthday itself so that their next seven years won’t seem quite as infuriating, relatively speaking, as they would seem otherwise.

You might be wondering why I didn’t say birthday boy or girl, above. This is because as you no doubt already know, girls mature faster. They know everything by age 10 or 11. Maybe it’s actually 10 1/2, which would explain why my brain is constantly addled re this point.

Knowing everything, by the way, does not last for either girls or boys. The day you learn this, I have learned, is either the first day you know anything worth knowing, or it is the day you start to know everything there is to know. For a while.

– James B. Nicola