48 things I've loved in 48 years on this planet
My birthday cup overfloweth
Hello, my beautiful Gems! I’m writing to you today from the place on the calendar showing my 48th birthday!
I woke up grinning. I am so, so, so happy to mark another year on this earth. I’m so happy to be 48! Late last year, I wrote about how important it is to me to live each year after the age of 47 in honor of my late mother, a memorium of sorts and a way to bring her along to experience through me all that she was deprived of experiencing because of MS. (You can read more here, paywall removed!)
So this morning had me feeling absolutely giddy and utterly nostaglic. I thought it might be a fun change-up to do a (non-comprehensive) list of things I’ve loved in 48 years here in this lifetime. There are way too many pictures but it is my birthday and I make no apology. Please note that if you are reading this via email, you might need to click through to see the whole thing!
Here we go:
Love’s Baby Soft original fragrance
Twister beads
we called these twister beads, but were they actually called Twist A Beads?? Riding a horse for the first time when I had a sleepover at my friend Lorraine’s house when I was six (we watched Grease, too, but riding a horse was the highlight)
Reading the back of a cereal box while I ate breakfast
Reading the Sunday comics at my grandparents’ house on summer Sunday mornings
kids today will never know learning cutting-edge political commentary as a nine year old via Doonesbury and a bowl of soggy Frosted Flakes My grandma’s homemade sticky rolls
When my grandpa would fill up the wading pool in their backyard and haul buckets of hot water out from the bathroom to add to the freezing cold water from the hose so our teeth wouldn’t chatter while we splashed and played
My grandma loading up my sisters and brother and I and taking us to the branch of the Kansas City library down the street where we would check out stacks and stacks and stacks of books (ghost stories were my favorite!) and spending the summer days with my nose stuck in a book
The Westing Game by Ellen Raskin
Cyndi Lauper’s She’s So Unusual album (on cassette tape), especially “Time After Time” and “All Through The Night”
The Babysitters Club series
born to be a Claudia, forced to be a Mary Ann My Barbies of the World Irish Barbie (I played with and loved my Barbies until I was in at least 6th grade!)
Going to the mall in the late 1980s/early 1990s PEAK CULTURAL EXPERIENCE
Mom, can I get an Orange Julius pleeeeeese?? The Princess Bride (I remember the specific first time that a fictional character ever gave me fluttery butterflies in my tummy - Wesley’s first “as you wish” in the opening scenes of the story!)
My C.U.T.I.E. figure collection
Standing next to my mom singing hymns in church on Sunday mornings. She was an alto and always picked out the alto harmony for us
YSL’s Opium fragrance - the original (now vintage) formula that was my mom’s signature scent
I can summon that scent in my mind in an instant, it was such a mainstay of my childhood My childhood pet - an American Tuxedo cat named Toby, I picked him out from a litter being given away by a neighbor when I was in 3rd grade. He lived until I was in college!
Walt Disney World, especially the Haunted Mansion ride
Having a sister who is 14 months younger than me, and when we were growing up, everyone thought we were twins, and we didn’t correct them!
A whole lifetime of shared history with this one! The volumes and volumes of private jokes I share with that sister, Emily
Laughing until my sides ached with my brother Brandon who is one of the funniest people on this planet
he’s looking very serious here on his wedding day back in 2011 but I promise you, he exudes hilarity! Being six years older than my youngest sister Sarah and discovering my innate maternal nature through being a second mom to her
so proud of the woman she has grown to be! Sliding around in the backseat of our babysitter Shannon’s ‘68 Mustang (no seatbelts?), smelling like suntan lotion (SPF 4!) and listening to Julie Brown’s album Trapped in the Body of a White Girl, especially Girl Fight Tonight! (“inappropriate” was not a concept applied to pop culture in the late 1980s!)
Having an incredibly good first boyfriend/first love and practicing writing my name with his last name “Megan Graves” in big, loopy cursive over and over on notebook paper
Going to Lake Murray with that boyfriend and cruising around the lake on his parents’ boat in a modest one-piece swimsuit with my hair saturated with Sun-In
The singular thrill of a new issue of YM or Seventeen arriving in the mail
problematic through a modern lens, sure, but I ate these UP! Watching One Life To Live and General Hospital with my mom and sister every day during the summer and on any sick days at home during the school year
Being in high school show choir
please enjoy this clipping from my high school yearbook Reading all of Michael Crichton’s and John Grisham’s books as a teen and feeling like a very sophisticated grown-up reader
My first car - a 1992 electric blue Camaro
Driving around town listening to musical soundtracks in that car - Les Mis, The Phantom of the Opera, The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, nothing was safe from us!
Violent Femmes album, Blister in the Sun of course, but also Please Do Not Go
‘90s country music
Having a small group of friends that have been enmeshed in my life since before I could drive and has stayed connected through phone calls, email chains, Zoom calls, and the group text for over 30 years!
we of the laugh-til-you-can’t-breathe club Being a Chi Omega and the incredible friendships formed in those years
YOU GUYS! I mentioned in the subscribers-only reading this month that I had lost my Chi Omega badge and then dreamed of finding it. While looking through pictures today, I FOUND IT! Nothing is ever lost. :) Knowing from our first one-hour phone call that I had met the man I was going to marry
Being a June bride
🎶 it was the 90s 🎶 Being a girl mom
the main cause of my sleep deprivation for the past twenty years, although these days it’s because “Mommmmm, stay up and talk to us!!” instead of midnight meltdowns! Being a twin mom
can you believe these two are almost as tall as me? Being a later-in-life mom
hands-down, best surprise of my LIFE Knowing the joy of a friend whose presence has grown from seventh grade silliness to full-blown once-in-a-lifetime and there-for-the-joys-and-there-for-the-sorrows best of friends, my Kathryn
the original Freezer Friend iykyk Praying in an Adoration Chapel, one of the most mystical sacred spaces you’ll ever find
the beach
Lebanon
one too-short week in 2016 changed me at the molecular level, I will never stop longing for Lebanon This monologue on dying from the character Erin as she lays dying in Mike Flannagan’s Netflix series Midnight Mass - ostensibly a horror story about an ancient vampire bringing death to an isolated island town, but actually about the nature of life, religion, and death. I think about this monologue all the time, it’s truly my Roman Empire:
Myself. My self. That’s the problem. That’s the whole problem with the whole thing. That word, “self.” Thats not the word. That’s not right, that isn’t…How did I forget that? When did I forget that? The body stops a cell at a time, but the brain keeps firing those neurons. Little lightning bolts, like fireworks inside and I thought I’d despair or feel afraid, but I don’t feel any of that. None of it. Because I’m too busy. I’m too busy in the moment. Remembering. Of course. I remember that every atom in my body was forged in a star. This matter, this body is mostly empty space after all, and solid matter? It’s just energy vibrating very slowly why there is no me. There never was. The electrons of my body mingle and dance with the electrons of the ground below me and the air I’m no longer breathing. And I remember there is no point where any of that ends and I begin. I remember I am energy. Not memory. Not self. My name, my personality, my choices, all came after me. I was before them and I will be after, and everything else is pictures, picked up along the way. Fleeting little dreamlets printed on the tissue of my dying brain. And I am the lightning that jumps between. I am the energy firing the neurons, and I’m returning. Just by remembering, I’m returning home. And it’s like a drop of water falling back into the ocean, of which it’s always been a part. All things… a part. You, me and my little girl, and my mother and my father, everyone’s who’s ever been, every plant, every animal, every atom, every start, every galaxy, all of it. More galaxies in the universe than grains of sand on the beach. And that’s what we’re talking about when we say “God.” The cosmos and its infinite dreams. We are the cosmos dreaming of itself. It’s simply a dream that I think is my life, every time. But I’ll forget this. I always do. I always forget my dreams. But now, in this split-second, in the moment I remember, the instant I remember, I comprehend everything at once. There is no time. There is no death. Life is a dream. It’s a wish. Made again and again and again and again and again and again and on into eternity. And I am all of it. I am everything. I am all. I am that I am.
Thank you, thank you, thank you for letting me share this list of loves with you on my birthday. Believe me, so much more could be added to this list, but I’m stopping here.
I love writing for you, and in this space, I am finding my way home to myself more and more with every passing month. I am deeply grateful for YOU and your presence here!
Off to collect my free birthday drink at Wawa and my free slice of birthday cake from Publix and enjoy my summer-y self,
Meg
PS - I love the work I am doing with people right now, especially the astrology Big Six readings. I loved hearing back from a dear friend over the weekend after she got her Big Six reading “Holy holy holy holy wow. I feel so eerily known right now. Thank you. …. This literally made me burst into tears in the post office parking lot. My mind is BLOWN” I would love to guide you into better understanding yourself, too! More info here.
Happy Happy Birthday! Yes to The Westing Game! Being only 2 weeks older than you, a lot of the growing up things would also have been on a list for me. The BSC, Love's Baby Soft, SPF 4! What were we thinking? I still see SPF 8 out in the wild every now and again and wonder who on earth is using it.
Happy Birthday Meg! Thank you for introducing me to so much awesome. Have a great year!