Ten Reasons Why I'm So Incredibly Fascinating.

  In no particular order.

1. I can wiggle my ears

2. Howard, a member in our long line of cats, used to pee in the toilet.  No, I don’t know how he learned it, but let me tell you, it certainly  creeped me out the day I passed the bathroom and there he sat. Never mind the inconvenience to a family of four with only one bathroom who all had to wait in line not only for each other, but now the cat.

(And it wasn’t really such a big deal – he never flushed.)

3. I once used to work for a certain government Agency known as The Company.   (In an astonishingly unimportant capacity.)

4. I have had lemon meringue pie in the Senate Dining Room with Hubert Humphrey. (Back story: I went to junior high with his niece and we used to entertain ourselves by flirting from the family gallery with the Senate page boys who were down on the chamber floor.)

5. My great-grandfather in Oklahoma met Jesse James. (The same great-grandfather who would invite the Chief of a local Indian tribe to sleep in the spare room when they were traveling through the area. It ticked off my great-grandmother no end because their guest always got bear grease on the sheets.)

6. Another relative, James Wilson, born in Carskerdo, Fife, Scotland, and later of Pensylvania, was one of only six men who signed both the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence. He also served on the Committee of Spies with John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. (An interesting factoid considering my family’s connection with a certain Agency.)

7. In the days we shared a room, my sister made me sleep in the bed nearest the window so that when the gorillas came, they’d get me first.

8. I once saw Donovan in London. (His car had broken down and I was on my school bus. This was the same school whose senior class put dish soap in Trafalgar Fountain one night so that the next day it was filled with giant bubbles when we passed by on our way to school.)

9. I was thirty years old when I learned to ride a bike. When I was learning, my sainted husband ran alongside as though I was six.

10. My children are perfect. No, really. And don’t even get me started on my grandchildren.