our friends turn older

today is my brother's birthday.

yesterday belonged to a bridesmaid and groomsman who have stuck it out with us separately since junior high and jointly through the eleven years vern and i have been together. nevermind the trials of the 8th grade, high school, or college. in just the past year or so being our friend has meant pulling our tahoe out of a ditch during a white-out blizzard. on a nearly shut-in gravel road. at 1-something am.

answering a cell one afternoon greeted with a muddle of high-pitched sobbing because salon girl cut caleb's bangs, and thus, all the boy's trade-mark charm and adding insult to horror his side-burns are cut to a long point and he doesn't even look like himself and please tell this man here he did a very bad thing having salon girl castrate caleb's mojo and it won't grow back - It Won't Grow Back In A Week - for my brother's wedding and Forever Caleb Will Look Like An Elf and i'm 36 weeks into a surprise pregnant and cannot walk or dance or even stand for family pictures and will forever look huge and wheelchaired and our dad is dead and you just don't chose willy-nilly at a time like this to cut off caleb's hair and you have to tell him because he Does Not Get It and thinks i am overreacting. probably getting this call for immediate crisis-intervention in the middle of target or lunch or? and undoubtedly with some words of support for the big bad him, gently expressing that now probably was not the time to have tried a new lord of the rings hair style for the boy.

those kinds of friends our children refer to as aunt and uncle, and not because we throw those terms around lightly. two of them shared a birth date yesterday.

their cards are yet here on the desk. along with my brother's.

we rock.