1) Who was your first prom date? Robbie Stover, of the Russell Stover chocolate family. He tasted sweet when he kissed me.

 2) Who was your first love, and do you still keep in touch? A boy in the first grade. He moved away before second grade and my heart was broken. I've forgotten his name but I can still picture his freckled face. 

3) What was your first alcoholic beverage? Sangria. It tasted like Hawaiian punch. I clearly have very sophisticated tastes. 

4) What was your first job? Tasseling corn for hybrid test plots. It was one of those jobs parents arrange for their children to convince them to go to college so they don't have to do manual labor. It worked. I hated it. 

5) What was your first car? A 1971 Chevelle. Ditto what everyone our age is writing about back seats big as bedrooms. My father, a banker, repossessed it, and I pestered him until he took money out of my college fund to pay off the bank. (I did not, however, spend so much that I had to go back to tasseling corn.)

6) Who was the first person to text you today? My assistant, wondering why I wasn't where he thought I was supposed to be. I am terrible at conveying to my staff that I'm supposed to manage them, not the reverse.

7) Who is the first person you thought of this morning? My daughter, who arrived from Boulder at 1:30 a.m. and left for Lake Powell at sunrise with her boyfriend. She was bouncing on my bed singing the song I used to sing her to wake her up for school. All my children are diabolical that way.

8. Who was your first grade teacher? Mrs. Lackey. She was about 150 but I loved her. She let me "read ahead." 

9) When and where did you go on your first ride in an airplane?  Mid-1960s, Disneyland. All the way home, my sister sang, "It's a world of laughter ..." (Sorry.)

10) Who was your first best friend and do you still talk? A kid named Kevin, whose family camped with ours. We were inseparable. Then we discovered gender and had to pretend to be disgusted with each other. We exchanged Christmas cards until he  moved to Coeur d'Alene and began sending me literature about how threatened the white race really was.  

11) Where was your first sleepover? A college visit. Sleepovers just weren't a feature of my childhood. No matter where we roamed during the day, we were supposed to be home in our own beds at night. 

12) Who was the first person you talked to today? My husband, who was hiding under the same pillow I was hiding under. He asked, "Are you going to get up and cook breakfast for Kate?" I said, "You do it."

13) Whose wedding were you in the first time. My father's cousin Linda Lee's. I was never a bridesmaid, though, because brides of our era didn't do the princess-for-a-day thing. Now I get to officiate at weddings (and some not-exactly-weddings) and beam at the happy couple. I love it.

14) What was the first thing you did this morning? Prayed. Then cooked breakfast for Kate. 

15) What was the first concert you ever went to? Bob Dylan and Joan Baez, a protest concert. "Gone to soldiers, every one. When will they ever learn? When will they ever learn?"

16. First tattoo? Nope. It's not something I ever found attractive, although recently I did see a cool totem tattoo that made me think, "If I were ever going to get one, that wouldn't be bad." 

17. First piercing? Ears, when I was about 35, because two of my kids (son and daughter) wanted theirs pierced. 

18. First foreign country you've been to?  Italy, but I promised each child a college graduation trip, and I'm going to Mongolia with a daughter next month. Eventually one has to pick Antigua, right?

19) First movie you remember seeing in the theatre? Something with knights, pennants and horns. Our downtown merchants (of which there might have been 15) subsidized Saturday matinees so our parents could shop. 

20. First detention? Ha. We didn't have detention. Our teachers had paddles! I was quiet and shy, though, and don't remember ever being in trouble at school - possibly because of the threat of being paddled. 

21) What was the first state you lived in? New Mexico. My father was, at that time, an encyclopedia salesman, trying to put off the time when he would move home and take over his father's bank. With parenthood came responsibility, so I was raised in Kansas, in the same town where four generations of my family before me had grown up.

22) What did you first want to be when  you grew up? An archaeologist, but my mother told me that they only got to dig for a few months of the year and had to spend the rest of the year in an office writing reports. I now live in the archaeological mecca of the United States and have two jobs that require me to sit in an office, writing. Go figure. 

23) If you had three wishes, what would the first one be? Lifelong health and happiness for my children. 

24) What is the first thing you would learn if you had the chance? The first? I can't just ask for universal enlightenment all at once? How to get around the rules, then.