Birthday Memories

Though my birthday was actually last Friday, my family celebrated it on Sunday--as we always do, with a dinner and the exchange of presents. Except my mom decided that it would be fun to mold the topic of the dinnertime conversation. We were to stick strictly to one thing, she decided: my family's memories of me.

I had a pretty good idea of where this type of reminiscing would go, considering I spent most of my childhood curled up in one particular corner of the living room with my nose stuck in a series of books. My mom would start off with one of her ever-famous stories about the difficulties in potty-training me . . . how I insisted on telling her when I was going to the bathroom in my diaper, but refused to do it in the bathroom until I decided I felt like it. (Guess I had my own timetable for things even then)

My older brother? I didn't know if he had any memories of me. When I gave him the chicken pox, maybe. I was almost positive that my sister would regale us with tales of how I used to eat dirt (once! it was once! and I was two . . . people think it's cute to eat dirt when you're that little).

Instead I learned that my family considers me, more or less, The Sickly One. As soon as my mom proposed the idea at the start of dinner, the stories came tumbling: "Do you remember when she had that goose egg on her forehead? It was huge! The size of a WHALE or something! And she got it on the way to school and she wanted to go to school and she wanted to go home" and "Do you remember that chicken fight when she broke her arm?" and "Do you remember when she fell over the retaining wall and broke her arm?" and "Do you remember when she had to stay in the hospital?" and oh my heavens! To hear their stories, it's a wonder I didn't die when I was a kid.

Granted, my right eye is blind. I have been in and out of the hospital a few times in my life. I've broken my right arm at least three times that I can think of. I started a minor chicken pox epidemic in my family. But if that's all that I'm remembered for by the time I die (which, granted, should not be any time soon since I'm not suffering from any particularly malevolent form of ill health), I am going to find a way of coming back to haunt my family.