Happy Birthday Old Dave
The day this boy turned 21 I was drinking my brains out in that charming underage way at the wedding of our cousin Eleanor. I had stuffed my babyfat-padded self into my sister Nan’s bridesmaid's dress since Nan was in St. Elizabeth’s with a ruptured appendix and the bride needed a stand-in. At the after-party back at Eleanor folks’ house we all watched the tube as poor Ted Kennedy, swallowing sobs, tried to eulogize his murdered brother Bobby.I was 19. My plans included a graduate degree in English, traveling in Europe and living for a time in France, where the populace would by wowed by my highly polished French, spoken with the accent of a person born on the Dorchester/ Roxbury line. They did not include marriage ,which I meant to postpone for many years.Two days later Eleanor was on her honeymoon, Nan was set to come home from the hospital and I was starting the summer job I acquired by hitch-hiking to Boston and asking for it . There I met Exhibit A here who, like me, was a research assistant assigned to the snoozy old library of the Massachusetts State House.I was an Irish girl and a Catholic girl sick to death of hearing how nobody else quite measured up to either of those two categories. He oops was not Irish and not Catholic. (Let's just say HE wasn't getting into Heaven OR the Country Club.) In spite of this fact it wasn't six weeks later that I woke my mom up out of a sound sleep to tell her I meant to marry him the second I got out of college and this I did.Now, three labor-and-delivery-style kids, six honorary kids and a world of dead pets later, we're both still here. And today, best I can tell , the boy with the dimples is merrier than ever. So here's to you with your now white hair, David Prescott M. I think it was the biceps that won me (the biceps and those tiny white-satin basketball shorts !:-) )
