"You're my second best friend"

This afternoon I was on my regular afternoon walk with dog and baby, prancing through the neighborhood with my glossy hair a-swingin'.

Oh, did I forget to mention? To quote Missy Elliott, I got my hair did. And as much as a horrendous experience at the salon would make for a more interesting blog entry, I gotta admit that my girl Nancy at Regis rocked my color today. The experience was a bit of a whirlwind, notwithstanding that I was there for just over 3 hours, what with the talk of highlights and lowlights and lift and glazing and toning and "combining a degree 5 and degree 6 color."

And I'm all, the who with the what now? Seriously, that shit is confusing.

But I explained as clearly as I could what I wanted: keep the drama of the dark color as much as possible, but work in highlights and root touch-ups to a) camouflage the considerable areas of gray (Nancy was diplomatic in her efforts to refer to it as "silver," bless her heart, but I was like, I appreciate you trying to be nice, but don't bullshit a bullshitter, mmkay?); and b) give the color some dimension so that it doesn't appear to be a monolith of flat black-brown, but rather has some natural looking variation. And Nancy paid close attention, asked lots of questions, and gave me a head of hair that I luuuuurve. It's exactly what I wanted -- the color is like a gorgeous, rich bar of dark chocolate with flecks of gold and reddish brown.

So, yay!!

Anyway.

I was walking with Max and Zeke, as I do every afternoon. And everywhere I go, I see young kids. They're everywhere in the neighborhood, and it's really fun to see them playing and running around, because it makes me look forward to Zeke at that age, and how much fun it's going to be to teach him to ride a bike and look for worms after it rains and play on the jungle gym and all that.

There's this one group of boys that Jason and I see regularly. They're about 8 or so, and they're always outside playing with transformers or tooling around on their RipStiks and just generally being boys. They're adorable. And they absolutely love my dog Max. So when they see us rounding the corner, we hear a chorus of "YOU GUUUUUYS!!! It's MAAAAX!" And like Batman responding to his signal, children start pouring out of the surrounding houses and they converge on the dog, who is more than happy to sit his old, blind ass down and get petted by 10 different sets of small hands. When they're done, one kid says, all excited, "OK, guys, let's go play!"

I love it. I can't wait for Zeke to be one of those kids.

Today I took a different route on the walk, towards the park. Around the block from the house, there's a big park with a large grassy area where older kids play football and soccer or other games they make up (today they had taken pieces of what looked like a curved plastic fence and were trying to "surf" down a little grassy hill). Zeke is fascinated by other kids, so we walked by there so he could watch them play.

At one point, two boys who looked to be about 9 passed near us as they went to cross the street. They were deep in conversation. As they passed, one was saying to the other, "you're my second best friend." And the other kid nodded like a puppy and said, "oh, cool."

I felt like I'd been punched in the gut.

Because if I'm honest with myself, if I'm looking forward to Zeke growing and learning and having fun, I also have to be prepared for him dealing with navigating his way through social situations and worrying about birthday party invitations and fitting in. Possibly having someone say to him, "well, I like you and all, but you're only my second best friend," and having him so eager to be accepted that he just eats that shit right up.

We've all been through it. It's just life. But all the same, my heart breaks for him knowing how some of it is going to be.