You are cleaning right now, sorting clothes into 'keep' and 'donate' piles, with the end hope of having a usable closet again. I am in the computer room, new music playing, cooling down from my second workout of the day and trying to give you the room you need to finish your task in the space of a day.

A day, this day, your thirtieth birthday.

On the day I married you, I stood there, twenty-one, wondering what in the world we'd manage to do with our lives if we walked in the same direction.

It's been so long since the discovery of the synchronicity of our birthdays that the magic of it is a little lost on us now: yours the sixteenth, your sister Lori's the eighteenth, mine the twentieth. Instead, over the years, October has just become 'our month'; a birthday week shared by us and, later, unwittingly, by two cats who were born five years ago, sometime between your birthday and mine.

It had been nothing but a random provocation of muscle, an awkward-standing up that led to a consistent, throbbing ache in my right lat.

"Rub it?" I asked Jeff, hopefully. "Not like scritchies, but real massage work?"

The phone rang.

"Hey, can I get you to do something for me?"I put down my cereal. "Sure," I said. "What's up?"

"Have you seen Edmund this morning?"

My mind raced. Oh, dear, had Edmund gotten himself stuck in a closet again? This could be bad. He tends to get destructive if he gets shut in somewhere. "Yeah, he's right here in front of me, looking at me. Why?"

"Would you ... would you take a look and see if there's something still dangling from ... his ass?"

To which I responded with the only possible reply: "What?!?"

The fortunate part about not knowing what lies ahead of you is that sometimes, not knowing makes it possible to muddle through a difficult situation. Sometimes foreknowledge only makes what is coming more difficult to bear.

Plane tickets present a definitive endpoint for talking; the mental equivalent of a sign over your friend's head announcing how many hours remain before it's time to pack up yet again and fly back into your regularly scheduled lives.

We watch the strangest stuff around here. Possibly the only thing stranger than a couple who intends to remain childless watching a show about human reproduction is hearing said couple's comments during the course of the show.

If someone starts showing me a laparoscopic view of actual human ovary as it's trying to, well, ovulate, of course I'm going to start providing Gary Larson-style commentary:

*hand puppet*

"Hi, I'm an ovary."

(Perhaps it was funnier if you were there.)