When I lived in the Washington, D.C.-area, I wanted Dad to come see the sights. Knowing my parents as I do, I knew they didn’t like to both be away from their bee ranch at the same time, so Dad needed a travel pal to fly across the country with him. My sister, BT, to the rescue! She’s adventurous. Mercedes, as I usually refer to her, has never seen a tombstone, monument, or museum she didn’t have to check out. Add Dad to the equation and she was all in for the trip. Here are pix I snapped of them at the Lincoln Memorial and at Harpers’ Ferry, W VA. (Yes, it is on this trip when people who saw Dad walking in D. C. honked their horns and/or asked for his “Sean Connery” autograph.)
Today, TIE O’ THE DAY wishes the merriest of birthdays to BT, my first-born sibling! BT is yet another “porch worthy” icon in my life. This morning I wrote about imagining Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Mom lighting up my old Delta porch with scintillating conversation, and I want y’all to know that the “porch worthy” BT, my Mercedes, would be sitting right there—laughing with us all, way too loudly for the neighborhood to handle without checking on us to make sure we old ladies were not in any danger of a medical emergency.
BT and I are the oldest and youngest of the family, 15 years apart in age—near-matching bookends to our siblings. We look alike, especially in our school pictures. We share a love of not just reading books, but of studying them. It’s like neither one of us ever left school. I don’t know what we’re studying for, but I can guarantee that if you give either of us a pop quiz on just about anything relating to history, social sciences, and the humanities, we would probably both pass—especially if we did the quiz together. We are both interested in almost any topic.
BT and I are on similar wavelengths in terms of public policy and the importance of including the word “responsibilities” whenever we talk about the word “rights.” We share a whole-hearted belief in Mosiah 2:17, about the importance of serving our fellow beings. And we do not tolerate bullying, in any forum. To us, meanness has no place in any context where human beings gather to learn, work, or worship. We stand against the whole of that sort of unnecessary contention, even when it sometimes feels as if we two are standing alone.
We have similar minor pet peeves. We most certainly get agitated when people who should know better don’t spell and use words correctly and appropriately. In fact, we are both slightly—but proudly—snotty about clear language usage. BT and I would both be embarrassed to be caught somewhere with our grammar down around our ankles, so to speak.
I could go on. I could give you a million ways we mirror each other, and I could give you a million ways we don’t. Suffice it to say that I find my Mercedes to be interestingly different from me. I hope I am the same to her. I would hate to be BORINGLY different from her.
Love and peace to you on your birthday, my Sister Who Lets Me Name Her in my tblog.
