Being born on St. Patrick's Day, it's never been hard to find a party on my birthday.  But Carol threw me a a birthday party last night that reached a whole different level of party coolness.  Coolness not measured by the quantity of green beer someone could choke down (before choking it back up), but by the quality of the people I am lucky enough to count as my friends.

The question I heard most last night, of course, was "So, how does it feel turning 50?"  At first, my quick reaction was to say, "Not much different," but as I spent time with folks at the party—or on the phone with folks that couldn't be there physically—my answer morphed into, "It feels great!"

It felt great to have a house full of very good friends—long-time friends from grade school or college to recent friends, near friends who walked to the party to distant friends that live out of state (even out of continent!), friends decades younger, friends my age, and friends decades older.

The party invite requested no gifts, but I am grateful to many of you that made donations to the ARPKD/CHF Alliance to help fund ongoing research into kidney disease.

It was also fun to receive a wire sculpture of a virus (above) from Stef Kopka.  (If you're not familiar with Stef's work, stop by Peaceable Kingdom in Ann Arbor and check out his life size sculpture of Shaky Jake.)  My new virus sculpture will soon be hanging in my office near the Albert Einstein marionette and the "prisoner Bush" figurine my brother carved me for other birthdays.

And I'm always pleased when cover-girl-athlete-super-achiever-Irish-cream-connoisseur-and-former-seidl-kid-nanny Marney Smiley (left) brings me a jar (yea, a jar) of her very good (and strong) homemade Irish Cream.  So I was triply pleased when, this time, she brought me three!

Thanks again, everyone!  And a special thanks to Carol for making it all happen.

I never finished my homework

'cause my brother made too much noise

I never finished my homework

'cause my sister stood in an unnatural poise

 

Suddenly

it dawned on me

that the strange and weird noises

and unnatural poises were from sleep

 

Whew!

I looked at the clock and read 2

 

Wait!

A.M.

"While I was in Iraq, I might as well have been circling the earth from a space capsule... Home was far away, a distant place that gobbled up whatever I sent back, ignorant and happy but touchingly hungry to know."

I recently read Dexter Filkins' book The Forever War. While I'm a pretty avid news gatherer and have followed the war closely, the book gave me a different level of understanding of what has transpired. Here we sit in the U.S. occasionally taking time to learn about the latest suicide bomber, or the troops that were lost in the last month, the state of Al Qaeda's forces, the ongoing conflict between Sunni and Shiite, the growing strength of Iran. We gather a vague picture of what things might be like in the middle east and then quickly move on to our sheltered lives (and I do mean sheltered, even with the economy in the state it's in.) All the while, the journalists that bring us these stories are living amidst non-stop turmoil, desperately trying to sort things out and deliver information to tell us what's really going on.

I was completely against the war before it started, afraid that we would do more damage than good. I've watched Frontline and other documentaries that have dealt with the harsh realities of the situation. So, I've long been aware that things are messed up but Filkins' book took my understanding to a different level. It is jammed packed with short anecdotes that describe his direct experiences. It doesn't contain much opinion, just multitudes of descriptions of situations that Filkins experienced first hand—most of them dangerous, many of them nearly life-ending, all of them unlike life in the states.

Reading page after page of Filkins' stories—he's embedded with troops, surrounded by snipers; he's meeting with the head of a Sunni insurgent group; he's walking into neighborhoods prohibited to Americans to enjoy some kebab; he's trying to hunt down the kidnappers of a fellow colleague; the list of fantastic situations is vast and astounding—I felt as if I were reading Tolkien or something. We just don't see this kind of wild adventure in real life.

But unlike Tolkien, as I read I knew the situations were real. Peoples lives were so deeply scarred, they would never recover and more scarring was going on at a rapid pace. Also haunting the pages was my concern for the author and our troops, an understanding that witnessing such utter chaos inevitably takes a bitter toll on one's life. I've long heard the sociologists and returning soldiers talk about the difficulty of assimilating back into civilian life but again this book gave me a deeper insight.

Several years ago, I first saw Michael Ware, now a CNN war correspondent, being interviewed on TV. Like Filkins, he was in Afghanistan after 9/11 but switched over to Iraq when the war started. I always appreciated his reports. He was sharp and articulate and seemed to embed himself in situations where few dared to venture. He dished up a viewpoint that was from the man on the street only it was more like the terrified fanatic on the bombed-out boulevard.

Sometime in the last year, I was watching CNN and there was Ware, seemingly drunk on the air. CNN aired Ware's report twice that night and I watched both times because I wanted to analyze if he was actually drunk—not just tired. Of course, my assessment could be wrong but I think he was definitely under the influence and it saddened me to see him like that. He fell off the pedestal on which I had placed him that night, or at least stood on a significantly lower platform. Now, after reading Filkins book, I regret passing any such judgment on Ware.

We are so very lucky that there are people on this earth willing to seek out every angle of a story even when their pursuits constantly put them in harms way. I don't want to underrate the sacrifice of our troops but some of the war correspondents, the ones that stay in for years like Ware and Filkins, are perhaps more courageous. These guys can leave at any time but choose to stay. They don't carry weapons and are often unprotected. Like our soldiers they also witness an untold number of horrors. They become sleepless and disturbed and entrenched in their missions.

I can't thank them enough for doing what they do and feel we owe them an immeasurable debt.