Remember being so excited about something…say, a birthday, or a trip to the beach, or the lake, or summer vacation, or Christmas, that you’d count the days down on the calendar?

Padding down the forbidden hallway at the forbidden hour of six am on a Saturday to watch your favorite cartoon? And then watching television when the parents weren't paying attention all day on Saturday (Kung Fu Theater!).

Sliding down said hallway in your footie pajamas after you’d heard your parents go to bed to see if Santa had come yet?

What about thinking to yourself that you wanted it to snow, but if you prayed for snow, you wouldn’t get it, so you would pray that it wouldn’t snow, in the secret hopes that it would actually snow?

Do you still make wishes on stars, on the candles on your birthday cake, on an eyelash when it falls from your lashes?

Do you get excited when you go to the mailbox and actually have real mail, not a bill or a catalog or some other solicitation, that’s really addressed, in a real person’s handwriting, to you?

Trying to catch a snowflake on your tongue?

What about having an actual record player, and playing the crap out of one particular song as loud as your stereo (headphones) would allow? I was partial to the Reader's Digest Sets - I think I had Greatest Hits of the Century...and would listen to "The Charleston" repeatedly and dream of being a glamorous flapper and having Gatsby fall in love with me.

Getting all dressed up, loaded in the car with your sisters and your books and your tape player, to go to Grandmother’s for Thanksgiving? And finally getting to sit at the adult table, and realizing that the kid table or the card table in the sunroom was MUCH more fun than the grown up table.

I wanted to be an adult my entire childhood. I was the serious child, the neighborhood babysitter, the one who looked after everyone else. As I grew older, my teenage friends all made fun of me and said I was like a thirty three year old in a fifteen year old’s body. Now that I’m getting ready to leave thirty three, I wish I could go back and tell my younger self to be in less of a hurry about everything. I wish I had known to savor the small moments (first rays of a winter sunset, Venus rising over the incoming tide, sailing through an untouched marsh, having a glass of wine and watching the twinkling lights of the Christmas tree, quiet moments at the grave of Grandmother Carol), and to take my time making decisions (I suffer from the Ragan disease of “must do it now-it-iveness”).

The small moments are what add up to make your life rich. The bigger things that seem so important, or so catastrophic, mean nothing in the face of a thousand happy memories...something I need to learn to live by.

As my middle sister said once in childhood (and is now a part of family lore)

"Don't worry, it will winse out"

It all does eventually.