Tuesday in brief

Today I am able to walk a little easier, but still clearly recovering from the race.

I neglected to mention a Pointy (writer’s group) meeting in the evening yesterday. So nice to share the projects we’re each working on with one another, and I’m lucky to have supportive friends who are also great editors!

After school today, R. went with a friend after school to get her (the friend’s) ears pierced. The friend, like R., had been forced by her mother to wait until she was 12 for this rite of passage.

I was 10 when I had my ears pierced. My mother (then 40) and my sister (then 8) had theirs done at the same time. I remember that it was shortly before our family’s Christmas trip to Hawaii. I can’t tell you exactly why the 2 memories are joined – maybe it was because we’d had to take the ear-care kit with us to the hotel? Or I’d been able to get a pair of shell earrings that I wouldn’t have had a need for, before? Either way, the piercing itself is not as significant in my memory as is the fact that the three of us did it together; a shared new experience for all of us, a small but still (for a 10-year-old) exciting adventure embarked upon together.

I don’t relay this story to S., who at 7 now feels that she shouldn’t have to wait until 12 to get her ears pierced. (The “It’s not fair!” refrain.) It doesn’t help that R. agrees that her little sister shouldn’t have to endure non-pierceness as long as she, the first born trail blazer, had to wait. But I'm standing my ground. For now.