I’ve just received word that one of my oldest friends in the world — by which I mean the friends I’ve known for the longest time, not those friends who are actually old — became a father last weekend. Keith Jensen’s daughter Aubrey Elise entered the world on Saturday, June 18, and she and Keith’s wife Danielle came home the following Tuesday. Presumably mother and daughter are both doing fine, and in the photos he e-mailed me, Keith himself looks like a new daddy should — somewhere between busting with pride and wondering what the heck he’s gotten himself into. (Just kidding! Mostly he looks very happy, and I’m happy for him and Danielle.)

You may recognize Keith’s name; he’s an occasional commenter here on Simple Tricks. He and I go way back, all the way to the sixth grade, when he and another kid named Brett Miller decided that they wanted to kill me. Whatever I did to provoke such a threat is long forgotten, and this blog is evidence enough that they never carried out their nefarious plot. By the seventh grade, Keith and I had become good friends and the Miller kid had vanished, no doubt off to form some shadowy criminal organization that will someday return to haunt me.

Since then, Keith and I have shared many adventures. We once rode the public bus all the way into downtown Salt Lake to see E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial at the defunct Crossroads Cinemas. As I recall, the trip required at least an hour and a couple of transfers; it was a heady dose of independence for two middle-schoolers from small, mostly rural towns out on the suburban frontier. I recall another occasion from about the same time when we spent the entire afternoon and all of our money playing this cool new video game called Zaxxon. (I don’t know about Keith’s mom, but mine was extremely unhappy that I’d blown my money on a video game instead of bowling like we were supposed to. I never did understand the logic there, since our plan had been to spend the money on some form of entertainment regardless of what it actually was. Parents…)

Later, in our high school geology class, Keith and I bravely endured the irrational hostility of a moccasin-boot-wearing upperclassman (we called him Public Enemy Number One) and we laughed about the blindingly obvious apathy of our teacher, who I believe was actually a gym coach who was only a chapter ahead of us students in the textbook. Later still, in our college ITW course (that’s Intellectual Traditions of the West, for non-U. of U. alumni), we lusted after the same girl, a fragile little hippie-chick with intriguing grey eyes who’d been moved up a year in high school and ultimately couldn’t face the pressure of being in college at the tender age of seventeen.

More recently, we traveled together through the tourist meccas of Florida with Keith’s parents and a suitcase filled with snack foods, and just two years ago, he and Danielle were my hosts and tour-guides for my big expedition to Germany.
A lot of interesting, important times…

So what do you say at a moment like this, to a friend who has been there almost since the beginning, who remembers what you were like as a boy, and what the world was like before everything changed? I have to admit, I’m really not sure. I’ve seen a lot of friends become parents in the last few years, and I’ve never quite known how to approach it. The best I can do, Keith, if you’re reading this — and I hope that you are — is to say congratulations, and offer you and your wife — your family, now — my very best wishes for the future.