Today is my sister Kate’s birthday. Please note, the name is Kate. Not Katie. Add an ‘ie’ to the end and prepare to feel the wrath of a lifetime of correcting people over and over again via intensely deep and non-flinching glare.
I was on an island at an overnight summer camp event off the coast of Connecticut when Kate was born…. Which was pure insanity. Not because myself and about 100 other kids were on this island, running wild, acting like natives and only being monitored by teenagers that were so TOTALLY looking after us… at night, in the dark, with maybe one or two real adults supervising the monitoring. With flashlights and FIRE. And not because we were allowed to stay up all night scaring the shit out of each other with the SCARIEST STORIES OF ALL TIME… Oh no… not any of this… because on this particular night… while I thought about my new sibling being brought into this world, the tail of HURRICANE BOB was thrashing the coastline. While I was on an island, right smack in the middle of it. And while we ran amuck on the rocky beaches with gail force winds beneath our wings… we stayed up almost all night… crash landing in tents that swayed along with the island that I was sure was about to release and make way across the Atlantic to Africa… we slept.
And the next morning, my Dad was at the dock waiting… Kate had arrived.
Happy Birthday!
