To My Niece

Foreword: To celebrate the birth of my niece, Haley Susan Ronaghan, I decided to write a letter to her to detail the day of her birth and some other things.

Hey Haley,

Your name has some good alliteration potential to it. Like I just wrote before, "Hey Haley" kind of rolls off the tongue. I like your name. It's pretty pretty. Props to your parents. I don't know whether it was your mom or dad who came up with it but, and this is just a guess, it might be your dad because I've known him to be good with names. Albeit most of the names I remember him coming up with were a hodgepodge of rock stars and baseball players that he used when we played wiffleball when we were younger.

You might notice I have a tendency to ramble and by the time you can actually comprehend this, you'll probably know firsthand. If you like the rambling, cool. If you don't, I'm sorry, this will probably drone on and jump from subject to another. Now onto another subject!

Today is the day of your birth, a mere 20 years and 2 weeks after I was born. It was a humid on-and-off rainy day. The Yankees played their first game of the 2008 season, which is the last season at Old Yankee Stadium but I'm sure you know that already as your dad will probably have told you. In case you forget, the Yanks beat the Toronto Blue Jays 3-2. The March Madness NCAA tournaments are almost done. Tonight in Women's Basketball, Tennesee beat Texas A&M and Connecticut beat Rutgers and the winners made it to the Final Four. In Men's Basketball, it was the first year that all four #1 seeds made it the Final Four. I'm scoping out different news outlets on the internet to see if anything else cool happened. There probably have been other cool things and I'm sorry I missed them.

I got the call from your grandma at 8:15 PM tonight. She was really excited and I heard your grandpa calling people in the background. You brought about quite a stir as most new babies do. I was eating tacos at Baja Fresh with my girlfriend, Lauren, and my friend, Dan, when the call came. I wonder if you'll like tacos or Mexican food in general. I hope you do. There's this cool Mexican place in New Hope, PA (across the river from where your Aunt Jill and Uncle Miles live) called El Taco Loco. Make a note of it. There's another Mexican place there, but I find its absurdly overpriced.
I have to thank you because your birth saved me about $15. I was planning on walking over to the Gamestop near Baja Fresh and buying Sonic Gems Collection for Gamecube because I've been on a Sonic the Hedgehog kick lately. Thanks to you, I saved money. I'll make sure I use that money wisely and perhaps use it to spoil you at some point. Remind me of that and I'll take you to a movie or something cool.

As of this moment, I am watching the Graduate (good movie, we should totally watch it when you're older) in my college dorm at William Paterson University in Wayne, NJ. I am in my second year here and I'm majoring in English and minoring in Philosophy. I recently got a volunteer job at Nintendo World Report. It's an independent Nintendo site. I'm really excited about it and I just posted my first review there recently. If you can't tell by now, your uncle is an unapologetic big nerd. I'd like to think this will hopefully score me some cool points when you get older.

As of this moment, I haven't seen you. I really want to. Your dad just sent me pictures of you. You're the cutest baby I've seen to this day, although there's a considerable amount of bias in that since you're my brother's daughter. I can't wait to meet you. I'm going to try my hardest to be the best uncle I can. I hope you won't notice by the time this makes sense to you, but I am very nervous that I won't be able to meet the standards of uncledom. I've never met you and I already love and care about you very much. I can't wait to watch you grow up. Thinking of you growing up makes me not be afraid of growing up. My childhood is coming to a close while yours is beginning. It seems almost fitting that I turned 20 two weeks ago and now you are born.

As much as I can't wait to see you, I wish you could meet your Aunt Aislinn soon. She's off in Bellingham, Washington working at Western Washington University at the Rec Center there. She's got the same alliteration in the name you'll call her that you have in "Hey Haley". I think you'll like her and I hope you two get to spend time together at some point.

I'm running out of things to say, kid. This probably won't happen often because I tend to talk a lot about things no one cares about besides me. I'll end this by saying a few things that I think are the most important things I could say to you: As your uncle, I will always be here for you whenever you need me, if you need me. I love you very much.

Love,
Your Uncle Neal