Battles with Integrity

Some many years ago, when I first started going to these BYOF BBQs, there weren't so many of those really short proto-people I saw running about (or laying about) last night at the play, the potluck, and on the rock. What's happening that all my friends (extended and otherwise) are threatening to wed, are becoming troth, and are associating with these heartbreakingly adorable little creatures?

Could it be, that when no one was paying attention, when we were distracted by the mundane, that maybe we... <looks left, looks right> ...we grew up?

T, you were our Peter. Cy, you were our Smee. Where have gone Wendy Darling, Slightly, Tootles, Curly, Nibs, and Tiger Lily? How have they been replaced with people who talk of Joint-Filings and Legislative Councils, of Mileage and Foreign Policy?

Still, I can only be grateful, as I look through this window out onto the morning of a gray, dull, adult world, that you my friends, are ones with imagination. I am gladdend that, despite your necessary adaptations to the dreary world of Men and Women, Politics and Work, that you are people who can still retain the liberty and capacity from time-to-time, to remember how to have good kid's fun. My friends play let's pretend. They climb upon rocks like mountain goats in the dark. They sing songs and tell stories. They remember when it is necessary, that when we choose it, we can still be Lost Boys and Girls whenever we want.

This is why Indian Rock will always be a small part of Never-Never Land to me.

Thank you all. I love each of you so very much.

One of my oldest¹ and dearest² friends here in the Bay Area³ has been holding a Groundhog Day celebration every year since the fateful Groundhog Day Y2K⁴. Each year he writes a new and different⁵ invitation and sends it to his friends. I like them. I think they are often⁶ funny. I figured I should put them down for posterity. Behid the cut, are the invitation letters he's sent out in the past⁷.

( Read more, if you think there is a point, though you might be disappointed... )

¹ But he's not old, he's not even thirty-seven.
² Still, I've known him longer than almost anyone else around here.
³ That is, people I've met since I moved down to East Bay from points north.
⁴ That was the year we had to run the TV and DVD player on a bicycle-powered generator, and celebrate by candlelight because the power plants had all succumbed to the Y2K bug. You remember, don't you?
⁵ There is no footnote number 5.
⁶ Dictionary.com defines often as 'many times; frequently.' That's close enough.
⁷ Seven footnotes in honor of GHDVII.

So that's that. Please feel free to post your recollections of Groundhog Days past, predictions for Groundhog Days future, questions or even non-sequiturs (just so long as they're sufficiently meta). Let the Groundhogging commence!