Yes, This Is Birthday Week!

When I was fifteen, I made my first trip to Europe and toured France and Switzerland. I made a scrapbook of the trip, carefully placing all the photos in order and labeling them so that I could remember everything about the experience. When I was about twenty-five, I found the scrapbook at my mom's and opened it and on about every other page there were pictures of dogs instead of my photos. These images were magazine cutouts of different breeds of dogs that had replaced my photos. "What IS this?" I wondered. Then I turned to the first page of the photo album and it had a title, written in what appeared to be a young boy's handwriting, "FRACE AND DOGGIE SCRAPBOOK" - yes, indeed, it was Frace without the "n" - written by my baby brother, presumably when I was away at college, when he had a little creative free time on his destructive little hands. One can imagine how many little family jokes we have about this incident, and we have used these jokes for the past fifteen years. You see, this ingenious redesign of my scrapbook was accomplished by my darling little brother, Don, who doesn't read my blog, so in my opinion is fair game. Have I ever mentioned that this brother, Frace-boy, has a PhD and is a university professor?

Should he get wind of this post, he will kill me, but it will be SO worth it!

Happy Birthday to you, my dear little brother. You are my very good friend and one of my favorite people on the planet. I love you.