what i thought about today while communing with jesus and an extremely tall ride that wants me to pay a bunch of money so i can scream like a little girl (no offense to little girls) on a 4-mile (12:26) sashay down memory lane (memory lane was closed to traffic as part of the ocean drive re-route so it’s now for runners only):

when i was a kid, nanny would always give me a card on my birthday. it contained cash, maybe five bucks, which was a huge amount of money to a 6-year-old back then or a hostess with the mostess at tony’s even today. on the front of the card, in nanny’s very distinctive writing style, she wrote “gary allen smith.” it always felt special that she included my middle name. it was a yearly ritual that lasted through my childhood. i always loved that card. only many years later, when i saw my name listed on some legal document (you knew it had to be right because it was typed — the old-school equivalent of the interwebz), that i realized my middle name was actually spelled alan. to this day, anytime i see it, i do a double-take, trying to remember what the actual spelling is. and when someone spells it wrong, it makes me happy. a memory of nanny and birthday cards and five dollars and a time when the world wasn’t such a scary place. embrace the spellings, the long versions, the short versions, the different ways people acknowledge you’re alive and important enough that they remember you.