Hello beautiful people,

 

I still have my copy of Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret.

It cost, I think, $2.49.

I read it over and over and over again.

And it is completely dogeared.

Which makes me laugh. Long before I started a company called Dogeared, apparently I was already dogearing the things I loved.

 

I remember everything that mattered: the bras. The periods. The crushes.

All the things a young girl desperately wanted to know about and, at least in my house, nobody was really talking about.

And remember, there was NO INTERNET.

If you wanted to know something, you asked your friends.

Your equally clueless friends.

Someone would announce something with absolute authority, we'd all believe her, and that was pretty much that.

Come to think of it, maybe the internet hasn't changed things as much as we think.

 

But we also had Judy Blume.

And she gave us a place for all those questions nobody else seemed to want to talk about.

I didn't know I was reading a groundbreaking book. I didn't know Margaret would become a character generations of girls would grow up with.

I just knew she got it.

She wondered about her body. Boys. Friendship. Belonging. Growing up. She wanted answers.

So did I.

 

And somehow that little $2.49 paperback became part of my life.

Fast-forward a whole lot of years.

My mom recently read Judy Blume: A Life, the biography about Judy, and called me afterward.

“I think you two could be friends,” she said.

Well, Mom, I'm game.

And I love the full-circle craziness of it.

The woman whose book I practically wore out as a girl is now someone my mother thinks I should hang out with.

 

Life is funny that way.

Sometimes something finds us when we're 11 or 12 and stays tucked inside us for the next 50 years.

A book.
A song.
A teacher.
A movie.
A sentence someone said once that you can still hear word for word.

 

And here's the part I love: we usually have no idea at the time what's going to stick.

We just live. We love things. We get curious. We change. We forget. We remember.

And every once in a while, we get to look back and see the little threads that were there all along.

Maybe that's some of the gold.

 

I was full of questions then.

I still am.

Thank God. (Are you there?)

 

And now I'm curious about you.

What book, song, movie, person or little piece of your younger life has somehow stayed with you all these years?

 

Hit reply and tell me. You know I read every email.

love,
mmc