Saturday, May 11, 2013

Traditions

Oh! Oh, how I giggled today when I checked my mail.

Let me step back a second.

Traditions.

Traditions with friends and loved ones and family and colleagues and, shoot, even your pets if you want them? Are the things that keep us human, keep us silly, keep us alive and happy no matter what you may be going through at the time.

My big little brother (and I call him that because he's three years younger than me but 7 inches taller) and I somehow started a tradition or two many many moons ago; going on over 15 years now.  And over 15 years, people go through a lot of things, right?  Moves and jobs and loves and break-ups. Financial strains and unexpected pleasures.  If you had told me growing up that my little brother (not bigger than me then) would keep up these traditions with me 15 years running? I would have laughed.  But we somehow have.

And so now I laugh -- as I did today checking my mail -- because we ARE still doing it.

We have two. Two silly traditions.  The first of which is that we never send an appropriate card for the occasion. It's your birthday? You may get an Easter card.  For Christmas? A sympathy one. Break up from a love? Oh yeah. That's when you get a Halloween card.  You get the point.

But the second is what we do on our birthdays. Steven lives in Phoenix; I'm in Atlanta. We can't get much further apart in the same country if we tried.  So what we do every birthday is send each other scratch-off lottery tickets from our own state in a non-birthday card (gotta be sympathy or new year's or something, right?) with the understanding that if either one of us scratches it and gets a win-fall, we use the funds to visit each other.

It hasn't happened yet.  Oh, but it will. We may both be in our 70s when it does, but I'm confident that if we've been doing it this long, we'll still be doing it then. God willing.

So his birthday was 9 days ago and I sent him the obligatory "Mazel Tov! Congratulations on your Bar Mitzvah!" card complete with 5 scratch off lottery tickets from the great state of Georgia.  And, in the appropriate response? He mailed back to me the two that actually just said "FREE TICKET" on them. He can't cash them there afterall.  So, yep. My gift to him was a gift back to me when he sent them because it meant my giggles and joy in going to the mailbox and finding a letter from him today.

And who knows? I might turn them in for those tickets and win my ticket out to see him.  Or I might get $5 that goes to sending tickets back to him to keep the cycle going.  Or there might be nothing.  Nothing until I get my "Happy Thanksgiving!" card on my birthday with $5 of scratch-off tickets from the great state of Arizona for my birthday 3 months from now.

Oh yeah.

Traditions with friends and loved ones and family and colleagues and, shoot, even your pets if you want them? Are the things that keep us human, keep us silly, keep us alive and happy no matter what you may be going through at the time.

And I'm still giggling.  

And, honestly? Blessed too.