Beautiful Birthday

 
 Birthdays are the most beautiful of occasions. People bestow you with pretty easy and obvious reminders of your luck in life. I am obscenely rich in so many ways. SO lucky. So loved, so enchanted with those I love and the life I lead. and how full it is! Goodness.

The chronicle of this birthday is quite funny thus far. I was incredibly lucky to share yesterday evening with the illustrious Julia Freake and Jeff Grandy as they exchanged wedding vows.
 

Julia is my surrogate sister, and it was the first wedding in our shared family. Other than Nick and Val's wedding I suppose, it feels like the first of my generation's real deal weddings. Everyone was so lovely! Sat at a table and reunited with both of my sisters (all of us together and single for the first time in nearly 10 years) and our momma, a former grade six teacher of ours who sang along to the background music ( Deja Vu by CSNY--one of my favorites) and her family. Danced with my sisters (including Rachelle, Collen & Julia) with my momma smiling on, drank, met new family and rekindled with old. Heart warmed into perpetuity.


The rest of the night was framed by the following moment: Susan ran to get me for a social excursion and slipped (dramatically and 'hilariously') ... still came to get me, and then fessed that she believed she really had hurt her arm.

We tried to be discrete, so not to upset the bride uneccisarily and then proceeded to leave the wedding, get lost trying to find the hospital in Dartmouth for pretty much 2 hours (We went to Sackville first, but the Emergency room there was Closed???  Did you know they close emergency rooms?) then was taken care of by Dartmouth General's really sweet staff, Slept on a few chairs, played trivial pursuit with a sleeping Susan, wrote in my journal,and it turns out she broke her arm, she got a dynacast (self-hardening splint) and a sling and we got home at 9:15am after consuming Burger King breakfast sandwiches. I love my sisters so much. We got grumpy occasionally, but it was actually an incredibly fun time, and Susan was really taken care of and... I think if we had tried to stay up drinking gin and watching movies at we'd planned, we wouldn't have talked and bonded so much. So, though I am sad Suzy doo broke her arm, I had a great birthday bonding time. I always want to hang out with my sisters.


It is now 2:45 on my birthday and I am just waking up, my heart is so full I wanna burst, watching Bored to Death and reading 95 beautiful Birthday wishes on Facebook and blowing my nose and thinking about my epic luck.


I'm pretty positive that this year I'll get to be a better person than ever before. Is this why growing old rocks??
Pumped. Pumped!!!!

Thanks for making me the luckiest lady alive.

One of the quotes of the night:

"I'm sure emerg would love two drunks and a dork coming in" -Sarah
"They're not drunk." -Mom
"I like that they are demonstrably drunk, and you left the dork comment alone"-Sarah
"...well... what can you do?"-Mom