Welcome to a new series on my blog where, every Saturday, I’ll choose a theme and ramble–perhaps coherently–about six different but related topics.

Since today is the first installment, I’ll start with Six Firsts, listed in chronological order:

First Airplane Ride: When I was 18 months old, my mom and I flew from Detroit to San Diego for my uncle’s wedding. I don’t know if being so young has anything to do with it, but I still love flying to this day. Especially takeoff.

First Book I Ever Wrote: A sweet little story called “Ten Little Bunnies” that I wrote and illustrated in Mrs. Brown’s first grade class. Very fancy with a laminated cover and plastic spiral binding. I’ve come a long way with my writing since then, but sadly, not with my illustrating.

First Date: I was sixteen and a junior in high school. Yep, sixteen, and the date was to dinner and the Homecoming dance. I was painfully shy and super awkward around boys, so this night was only memorable because of how pathetic I was. I’m (mostly) able to look back and laugh about it now.

First Car: It was a white Chevrolet Cavalier, model year circa the late 80s, that my parents bought for cheap from my grandma’s hairdresser for my senior year of high school. The ceiling foam was exposed, in which we scratched messages, and it had a decal on the back window for Ski-Doo that said, “Snow, Ice, or Grass: I’ll still kick your ***.” I was embarrassed by the last word and scraped it off, but we still affectionately called that car The Ski-Doo.

First Drink: I was twenty-three (#latebloomer again on this one) when I shared a Key Lime Pie martini with a good friend at a hotel bar in St. Louis. She was my plus-one for a weekend trip paid for by the insurance agent I worked for at the time. The martini was good, but the company was better. The best part of our trip was seeing The Compleat Works of Wm. Shakespeare, Abridged.

First Time out of the Country: Let me start by saying I grew up half an hour’s drive from Canada, in the days before a passport was required, so I’m not counting Canada on this one. In 2006, I went on a two-week mission trip to Hungary with my church. As we took off from JFK, I saw a row of yellow DHL trucks, and it made me feel very apprehensive and prematurely homesick about going into such new territory. But you know what I saw in a parking lot adjacent to the airport when we landed in Budapest? Yellow DHL trucks, and it was exactly the comforting sight I needed. Definitely not a coincidence.

Drop any of your first memories of these six categories in the comments…I’d love to hear your stories!