Deann

Deann, on Thursday, November 13, 1975, the world was carrying on as usual: Americans were arguing about gas prices, teenagers were perfecting the feathered haircut, and somewhere in Sherman, Texas, you made your grand entrance and quietly became the most important event of the week. Nobody issued a press release. A frankly unforgivable oversight.

Gerald Ford was in the White House, a man who had become president without winning a single national election and who was spending that autumn trying to convince the country that inflation could be beaten with lapel buttons reading WIN, for Whip Inflation Now. The buttons did not whip much of anything. Just days before you arrived, Ford had shaken up his cabinet in what Washington dubbed the Halloween Massacre, and in New York the city was teetering so close to bankruptcy that the Daily News had recently summed up the President's position as FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD. Across the ocean, Spain was holding its breath as Francisco Franco lay dying, and the Vietnam War had ended only that spring. From the calm of North Texas, it must have looked like the rest of the world was having a very dramatic year. You, meanwhile, were simply having a birthday.

On the radio, Elton John's Island Girl was sitting at the top of the charts, which means your earliest weeks may have had a soundtrack whether anyone planned it or not. Jaws had spent the summer turning beaches into crime scenes, and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest was about to take Jack Nicholson's grin into theaters everywhere. On television, families gathered for The Waltons and Happy Days, and a brand new show called Saturday Night Live had premiered just a month earlier, though Texas bedtimes probably kept it a rumor for most. A gallon of gas cost about 57 cents, and folks considered that outrageous. Bell-bottoms were wide enough to shelter small animals, and the pet rock was about to become the season's most baffling gift. Somebody paid real money for a rock. You arrived in a different economy.

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Football, naturally, was the real religion. The Dallas Cowboys, with Roger Staubach under center, were building toward an unlikely Super Bowl run that would end that January, and the Cincinnati Reds had just won a classic World Series over Boston, a seven-game epic that included Carlton Fisk waving his home run fair in Game Six. In Sherman, mid-November meant crisp mornings, highs somewhere in the sixties, and that North Texas specialty where the weather could be pleasant at lunch and bitterly windy by supper. Friday night lights were still burning in Grayson County, and pecans were dropping across town.

It's a funny thing to look back on a day like that, with its rotary phones, wood-paneled station wagons, and grown adults buying rocks in cardboard boxes. The world felt enormous and a little chaotic, just like it does now. But somewhere in all that noise, a new story began, and it has been unfolding beautifully ever since. Some years are remembered for presidents and pennants. This one, at least for the people who love you, is remembered for you.