Feliz Cumpleaños

True story. Three years ago today, I was at home, fussing over a printer jam, when something electric and malevolent shot through me. I felt as though I had been hit and liquid fire was coursing through my veins. I knew something was terribly wrong. Not with me, but with someone I loved. In that first moment I swung around wildly, not quite sure what was coming in. And my eyes fell on my Marine Corps flag. In that moment, I knew with a certainty I cannot explain that my friend, who was serving in Iraq, was in trouble. I fell to my knees and began to pray with an urgency that must nearly have matched that of Daniel in the lion's den.

Days went by and I heard nothing. My e-mails to him went unanswered. My mouth was full of a taste I recognized as fear. And, while my prayer on the first day had been full of power and fierce protection, as the days wore on with no news it delineated into something more like an incantation, "He's okay. He's gotta be okay." And then downhill a little farther still to, "Please let him be okay. PLEASE let him be okay." A kind of primordial begging.

And then, finally, the e-mail came. He was okay. Glad to be alive. A little worse for wear. (Being in a Hummer when it's hit by a mortar round can have that effect.) Better off than the men in the convoy ahead of him. May they rest in peace.

We met in the wake of 9/11, when he was patrolling the George Washington bridge. And, unlikely as it seemed initially, we forged a friendship that's lasted nearly a decade now. It's a quirky and idiosyncratic friendship, to be sure, but a friendship nonetheless. And for me, the proof of the connection was that moment when I felt something happening to him half a world away. I don't fully understand why those connections happen but I honor them.

Of course, honoring the connection isn't really hard when its to someone who is outrageously sexy and can make you laugh even when the world seems to be crashing down around you. Happy Birthday, dear friend. Here's hoping the year ahead is full of health, happiness and wonderful surprises.