This year my sister, Meredith, has been writing nice tributes to family members on their birthdays. Since I doubt that she will write one for herself, I decided that I should write one. Hopefully, she will put a link on her blog to mine so that her friends can see how wonderful I think she is.
I don't have the writing ability or creativity that Meredith has. To do her justice I should have started on this long ago. I won't put it off until next year though. It seems to me that all too often people put off saying nice things about people until they die. It is nice to be able to share stories and memories about someone who has died, but isn't it nice to tell the person while they are still alive?
Meredith and I are very different. We have very little in common, yet I always enjoy the time I spend with her. She is incredibly creative and that comes through in just about everything she does. I love her writing, her drawing, her pictures, her crafts, and the way she is able to recount simple, everyday things in a way that has you on the edge of your seat. To get a letter from Meredith means a handmade envelope, a cute little doodle, or witty words. To have her tell you about something she saw or did is like you were there yourself. I really admire her talent. I often think that I have some good ideas, but not the talent to do with them the things she could do. Maybe I am just lazy, but I feel like I would have to work so hard to come up short of what I see her regularly achieve.
I see myself as a rather boring person. I like to be safe, comfortable, and secure. That may seem like an odd statement from someone who currently lives in Africa and moves every 2 or 3 years. I don't like to take risks. Meredith dreams big and finds ways to make it work. I love the way she makes bold choices that I would never make. She doesn't go for easy, she goes for exciting. I would be a nervous wreck living the way she does, but I love that she does it. I think that when she looks back on her life she will have very few regrets of things she did not do.
It was hard to decide what to write and what pictures to include. I started with a huge pile, but realized that I needed to choose only a few. I tried to find some that people may not have seen of her. The first is pictures of sweet little Meredith when she was a newborn. She is ten years younger than I am and seven years younger than our brother. We were so excited to have a baby sister and we loved her to death. At four pounds, four ounces she was like a doll. Even at an early age she was her own person. She had the cutest little facial expressions and she knew how to SCREAM!
This next picture was taken the second time we lived in Belgium. I don't know exactly how old she was when it was taken, but kindergarten age is the oldest she could have been. She decided that she wanted to marry someone we knew from church. She made him a picture and I think considered it an engagement. What a good sport he was! Don't you just love Meredith's Rainbow Brite dress? Very 80's. She had a lot of clothes with personality including two jackets. The purple one was Michael Jacket and the pink one was Janet Jacket. How cute is that?
Meredith and I generally got along. Sure there was the normal squabbling that you would expect siblings to have, but with so many years between us we weren't competitive or anything. She was my baby sister and I loved being a big sister to her. When we did have fights, arguments, or whatever you want to call them, they didn't last long. This is a note that she wrote to me near the end of my senior year. She would have been just shy of eight years old.
Here is a picture of Miss Meredith A Bak playing T-ball. Even at a young age she was good at sports. :P
I wish I knew when this picture was taken. Obviously it was some Christmas. I believe it was between 1991 and 1994, but no guarantee. We decided to be "Bow Legged Sisters" though I am not sure why.
This is another Christmas picture. I would guess it is also 1991 to 1994, but not the same Christmas as the previous picture. Our dad had (and still has) a tendency to call Meredith my name. One time she had a friend come over and when he answered the door he greeted her and said, "you must be Kathryn's friend." Poor Meredith. (In defense of my dad, I only have two children and I can't keep their names straight. Not only do I call them each other's names, I call them my siblings' names as well!) My dad had labeled some of our Christmas presents and we decided to label ourselves to make things easier for him.
Meredith has always been creative. In high school she was into drama. Here is a program from Meredith Madness II. (Yes, there was a first Meredith Madness too.) She wrote and directed all of the plays AND acted in most of them. She has the ability to crack me up. In college she continued to be part of a drama group that performed as far away as Hawaii. Don't take a big sip of a drink when Meredith is talking, or you might just have it come spraying out your nose as you laugh.
This last picture is one drawn by Meredith to represent our family on a trip we took to Yellowstone in May of 2001. There is our dad, mom, me, Meredith, our brother (Nathan), and his wife (Amy) holding their son, David. Nathan and his family were living in Colorado at the time, I was living in Maryland, and Meredith was home from college for the summer. Now I understand Meredith is not going to have pictures hung in museums as great masterpieces of our time, but I love her style. She has made posters, books, shirts, and other things featuring her
cartoonish art work. It always brightens my day to see something that she has drawn.
I had hoped to go through this yesterday and fix it up a bit, but I had a migraine and didn't even turn on the computer. There was something else that I wanted to add, but I can't remember what it was. It will have to go online as is. Sorry, dear Meredith, that it is not better. I love you. Happy, Happy, Birthday!
