My ace in the hole as a human being used to be my capacity for remembering birthdays. I worked at it. Whenever I made a new friend, I made a point of finding out his or her birthday early on, and I would record it in my Filofax calendar.

Orlean frames birthday-remembering as a cultivated social skill—an “ace in the hole” that functions like a small, reliable form of intimacy. The detail that she “worked at it” and logged dates in a Filofax underscores that what can look like effortless thoughtfulness is often deliberate labor: a system for sustaining relationships. The quote also hints at a shift in how people manage social memory—outsourcing it to tools and routines—and suggests the quiet anxiety behind friendship maintenance: the fear of forgetting, of seeming indifferent. In presenting this as something she “used to” rely on, she implies changing habits or technologies, and the way identity can be built around such practiced attentions.