Tomorrow’s Suzanne’s Birthday

I’m getting a jump on wishing my Matron of honor, dearest friend Suzanne a Happy Birthday. Tomorrow is her big birthday and with Covid It is certainly not going to be the celebration I normally would have participated in.

As we are are locked in our own homes far from each other I wanted to give all our common friends a heads up to wish Suzanne a Happy Day on February 17!

Suzanne and I have been friends for 42 years. I can’t imagine how I would have made it through all of life’s milestones without her. One of my favorite things about her is how supportive she has always been. Like our senior year of college. It was second semester and I needed two gym blocks to graduate. Gym in college was all about showing up and second semester I was busy with interviews so in order to ensure I did not fail any gyms I took “self paced gym.” You could do this if you wanted to do an activity that the college did not already offer.

Bowling was not a class at Dickinson, so I created one. If you create a self paced gym you have to also offer it up to the whole college to join you. This is the catch that kept most people from creating their own gym classes. When I started this bowling class it instantly became a hit and 140 people signed up for my class. Suddenly, what was supposed to be a gut gym class became a nightmare of me running a bowling league at the Carlisle Lanes. I had to get us “coaches” who actually knew how to bowl.

One day after I had gone to bowling class I arrived at lunch at school. I got my tray and went to the table where Suzanne and I ate with our friends, Janet, Hugh, Doug and Dave every weekday lunch. As I put my tray down I announced, “I bowled a 167 this morning.”

Suzanne immediately responded, “Oh my god, this is getting embarrassing, you are getting good at bowling.” She was right, bowling was certainly not something I was ever going to use again, but at least I graduated.

Some years later, our lunch group all came to Washington and we caravanned to my family farm for a big weekend party. On the drive down the traffic was terrible so we decided to make a stop at the Culpepper Lanes, in Culpepper Virginia to play a game while the traffic thinned. As I threw strike after strike Suzanne admitted to me that she wished she had taken bowling class.

I think it is never too late for us to get that bowling coach. She will certainly be better than me at bowling as she is better at every sport than I am.

Even though we are not getting to be together for her milestone birthday and we will probably not be together for my milestone one this year too I hope the pandemic will ease while we are still in this milestone year so we can be together to make more fun memories, maybe not bowling, perhaps bridge.

Happy Birthday Suzanne!