Hints and Guesses

Surprise, surprise. Surprises can be fun, but I’d rather be the surpriser than the surprisee. A childhood in which most of the good and most of the bad (in other words, nearly everything) was a surprise heightened my appreciation of the value of anticipation.

One memory of a surprise floats to the surface. Most of the setup details are lost to my memory, but when I returned from Korea in 1989 at the beginning of my fourth year in college, I didn’t tell my sister exactly when I would be returning. I told some friends, however, and we concocted a plan wherein a group of them would be at the airport to greet me. She’d go there too, on her own, having been told by her boss to pick someone up.

She was surprised, all right. We both cried, and our friends laughed at their success.

Weekly Anamnesis