Words

On March 28, 2009, at exactly 11:14 p.m., I was asleep in bed when I heard my husband Scott’s cell phone ring on the night table next to him. A heavy sleeper, he didn’t budge, but I thought the late-night phone call was strange, so I climbed over whim and took a peek at the caller ID. It was his brother Ryan. Odd, I thought. The two don’t talk too terribly often, but when they do, it’s usually at a decent hour.

“Oh, WAIT! WAIT! WAIT!” my friend Leila said as we were getting off the phone the other day.

“What?” I replied, stopping short of hanging up on her.

“I forgot to tell you!” she said excitedly. “Annie got married!”

Her sister Annie, a writer living in New York, met a guy a few months ago and had reportedly traveled to Dubai to visit a friend and then met up with aforementioned “guy” in India, where they tied the knot.

It was March of 1982. The moving vans arrived at our new house on Knox Valley Drive to deliver the contents of our family of five’s new home. Once the bikes were located and off-loaded, my sibs and I jumped on and began riding around in the garage, which led to the cement-floored basement. While my parents delegated which boxes went where, my brother, sister, and I followed each other around, riding in and out of the dark, damp nooks and crannies of our new home’s bottom-most space.

A few years ago I read a newspaper article about how “girl groups” were becoming more popular. Not to be confused with boy bands, the girl groups the article mentioned were literally that: groups of girls who got together to hang out, catch up, bond. The writer of the article interviewed several different women from a variety of groups. One group gets together once a month for dinner, taking turns with who picks the restaurant. Another group formed a book club, and they rotate whose house they meet at and who selects the next title.

We have a running joke in our family. Whenever we’re out somewhere, my dad — an extrovert in every sense of the word — takes on the accents of those with whom he’s speaking. If we’re talking to someone from the Deep South, he suddenly sounds like he was born on the bayou. Chatting it up with a New Yorker, he’s instantly Tony Soprano. And one time, when we were all dining at a lovely Japanese restaurant in Atlanta, Dad channeled Mr. Miyagi and gabbed with the server for quite a while.

It was July, 1985. I was scheduled to have surgery on my feet to remove my bunions. (I know. Gross, right??) I had just finished fourth grade, and my parents thought it best to do the surgery during the summer so I didn’t have to miss any school. And so I did.

It was a crisp fall morning at Boston University. Students were racing about, cups of coffee in-hand, backpacks loaded to the gills, no-doubt late to their respective classes. I stopped into Campus Convenience to grab my standard Power Bar-and-Diet Coke breakfast, then dashed off to the cinema where my early morning lecture took place.

This month I bring to you “The Top 10 Things I Remember About Past Birthdays, Anniversaries and Any Other Momentous  Occasion — Mine, Yours or Anyone Else’s” (in no particular order, of course!):

10. My 30th birthday surprise party. I always complain that with my birthday being in late November, it always gets grouped into the Thanksgiving festivities and never fetes its own celebration. Thank you to my sister and husband for making 30 special.

I come from a family of five. There’s Mom and Dad, and my sister, Dana, who is nearly five years older than me, and my brother, Dave, who is seven years older. Being that Dave was so much older, I have few memories of really hanging out with him growing up. He was always out with friends or going off to college or doing whatever it is that people who are seven years older do.

I’ve been asked it a million times. “You’re not from around here, are you?” And it’s not in the cheesy pick-up line kind of way. It’s always by fellow females who sense that I lack that certain Southern girl something ... the thing that makes ladies love pink and lace and lipstick and sundresses and hairspray and curling irons. The girly gene, if you will. Yeah, it skipped me.