Why is living so big? These are the reasons.

My grandfather is eighty and has had a driver's license for sixty-four years without a single accident. He drives exactly the speed limit. Always. So I was shocked when he suggested we go to the go-kart track for my sixteenth birthday.

I'm from Ohio and know exactly nothing about cricket. Last year, my company hired a team of engineers from Bangalore, and in March, they invited the rest of the office to play in a parking lot after work.

I walked past a little music shop every day for six years on my way to the train. In the window, there was a mountain dulcimer, a long, narrow wooden instrument with a heart-shaped hole, that never seemed to sell.

I'm afraid of heights. I've always been afraid of heights. So when my teenage son asked me to go to the new indoor rock climbing gym with him in February, I agreed, mainly because he never asks me to do anything anymore.

My son's elementary school celebrated Lunar New Year this February with a lion dance, performed by a group from the local Chinese community center. I'm Chinese American, and my son has always been a little shy about it. He's one of three Asian kids in his grade.

I have given my wife fifty-two Valentine's cards. The first one I bought at a drugstore with money from my paper route. It had a cartoon bear on it and I spelled her name wrong.

I grew up in Tehran and moved to Colorado for graduate school. In February, my labmates convinced me to try skiing. "It's easy," they said. They were lying.

When I was a little girl, my father built me a dollhouse with three floors, a staircase and real wallpaper. When I grew up, my mother wrapped it in blankets and kept it in her closet for thirty years.

In January, my friend talked me into a "learn to curl" night at the local curling club. I'd only ever seen curling on TV during the Winter Olympics and thought it looked like shuffleboard on ice.

On Christmas Eve, my neighbors and I went caroling for the first time. It was my idea. I'd seen it in old movies and wanted to see if people still did it.