3.14.03 ides

We all know the famous line beware the ides of March.... but did you know that "ides" simply means the fifteenth of the month?

I have a specific reason to be wary: Byron has a birthday tomorrow! How old is he? If you ask him, he will say twenty-one. I doubt he actually knows the answer. But since he is two months younger than me, that means he is turning thirty-two.

Why should this wondrous day worry me? Because I am unable to come up with a fabulous plan for a celebration. We've been so busy... he is under deadline at work... all the normal frivolous excuses. I have email out to all of my local friends asking for creative ideas.

Since I haven't thought of a plan to do something with Byron, I'll use this space to review our love story:

We were roommates and disliked each other intensely. He hid my hairbrush. I evicted him.

He moved into a van in the driveway and had an extension cord running through the living room window. I unplugged it.

We lived in a tiny college town and traveled in an even smaller social circle. We were young and studious and sad and our friends were rather antagonistic. We drank coffee together, our school papers spreading out across the table.

I had a small daughter with big ideas and if she didn't like someone she would spit in their face or kick them in the shin. She loved Byron so much she shared her gummy bears with him. She rode on his shoulders, patted his face with her sticky little fingers.

My doctor said I had to have cancer tests. Byron drove me to the grim military hospital and waited in the dirty lobby, then drove me home again.

I was tangled up in misplaced romantic commitments. He was dallying with all the wrong people (usually a roommate or roommates girlfriend).

One day my daughter was visiting grandparents and Byron asked would you like to come over and watch a video? and even though it was wrong and a continuation of our shared habit of poor dating choices, we stumbled into a relationship.

After a few weeks he said we can't live together and I said okay.

After a few more weeks I said you are paying rent for a room your roommates have taken over; since you never leave my house, maybe you should just move in and he said okay.

We were young when we met, and twenty-one turned into twenty-two and the years started to accumulate. I finished graduate school and he started his doctorate and we moved together into a murky adult future. Somewhere along the way, against all reason and our own stated philosophies, we fell in love. What a wonder - something precious and strange, not adolescent longing, not mutual pathology, not something we were looking for, not something either of us knew we wanted.

Surrounded by cynical indie rockers and anti-everything punks, we both worked hard to get through school, be decent, raise a small child. It should have been hard. The pressure and the lack of community should have broken us up. But somehow we drifted into a sustainable and rewarding and interesting and fun love story, and every year has been better than the last.

This is true love - real, factual, practical love. We have shared poverty, emergency room trips, the deaths of friends and family and mentors, a life-threatening pregnancy, the care of a premature infant. We both finished graduate school; and someone has always held down a real job to maintain health insurance and feed the kids.

Byron is the only person I have ever known who will hold me when I cry, who allows me to be vulnerable, who honors all of my strange self. But more than that: we have fun, more fun than I ever imagined was possible. We are eager to see each other at the end of each day, we talk into the night, we laugh together and have crazy adventures, we find grace in the fact of our family.

My daughter is as tall as me and she doesn't remember a time in her life when she didn't know Byron. Our son, at six, is nearly up to my shoulders. He will be a tall man like his dad, easily six foot six or taller. The children are eccentric in their own charismatic ways, but healthy and happy, reflecting the integrity of our family.

Byron turns thirty-two tomorrow. He is charming and intelligent and flirtatious and funny. He works hard, and he listens, and I respect him.

I feel lucky that he is my friend.

Happy birthday, Byron!

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