Happy birthday, B

Today my friend B turns ... well, I won't say. I don't have a friend that I "grew up with" in the ordinary sense, no one who matched me step for step over the long haul of childhood. But B is the person I "grew up with" as an adult. I met her when I was in my 20s, and we have been fellow travelers—literally sometimes—ever since. She doted on my first-born, saved my second-born from abortion, walked me through the valley of cancer, flew from New York to visit me in San Francisco when my mother had a stroke and my father was hit by a bus. Mostly she's provided a moral compass for me whenever the dial on my own has gone into a spin. She's been my personal Emily Post and Abigail Van Buren and my rabbi too (since she's actually Jewish and I'm merely Jew-ish). It's not just pain we've shared but pleasures too: parties and trips and movies and books. Happy birthday, B—and lucky me!