Happy birthday to a favorite human

You have been my friend. That in itself is a tremendous thing. I wove my webs for you because I liked you. After all, what’s a life, anyway? We’re born, we live a little while, we die. A spider’s life can’t help being something of a mess, with all this trapping and eating flies. By helping you, perhaps I was trying to lift up my life a trifle. Heaven knows anyone’s life can stand a little of that. – E.B. White, "Charlotte’s Web"

There comes a time in our lives when looking back requires a telescope, the years extend so far in the distance. Like the year of our 30th high school reunion or reuniting with college professors after 25 years, or revisiting our alma mater as a Real Adult (imagine!), or just realizing that we’ve been friends with people not for five or ten years, but for 25 and 30 years and beyond. Wow, wow. wow.

And at that time, just when patterns start revealing themselves, we can see which strands of our life’s web have withstood the vagaries of time, and which haven’t, can’t we? Sometimes those threads and the depth of emotion we feel at them are surprising, as if we are tapping not into the simple circumstance of our proximity to someone (we took one class with them, they were on the same semester abroad program, they make us laugh, they warned us not to date the man who looked like a young James Taylor), but–rather–tapping into the value of that connection, beyond circumstance. Deeper than circumstance, somehow.

That’s all to say a simple happy birthday to one of my favorite humans in the whole world, a connection far less dependent on circumstance than on something else, something that is somehow ineffable, even after all these 28 years. To someone who has woven webs to lift up my life in ways he cannot know, someone I have loved all these years.

And so, happy birthday, Howard Holden.