Filling in the gaps regarding my travel home: I flew from Manchester to Atlanta, then Atlanta to Baltimore, where KB picked me up from the airport and took me to an amazing Afghani restaurant, the Helmand in the Mount Vernon neighborhood of Baltimore. All of the food was delicious, but the highlight was the appetizer, kaddo borawni, “[p]an fried and baked baby pumpkin seasoned with sugar and served on yogurt garlic sauce.” As KB says, “it kicks ass.” I think that’s a culinary expression.

Then back to KB’s to hang out a little and eat chewy chocolate chip cookies. By 10:00 pm, though, I was ready to crash and crash hard. In the morning, KB drove me back to the airport with a ration of more cookies, plus bing cherries and blueberries. (Ever notice how much I talk about food? I get that from L.) Then Baltimore to Cincinnati, and Cincinnati to KC.

And if all of that weren’t enough to qualify KB for sainthood, she also gave me a tape with the second half of this year’s season of Six Feet Under (she’d already taped the first half for us) along with the first episode of this season’s The Wire. For fans of NBC’s dearly departed Homicide, The Wire is a very satisfying fix, at least as good as its more famous HBO siblings SFU and the Sopranos.

Let me remind you that KB is walking in the Two-Day Colon Cancer March in October. If you’d like to sponsor her, email me and I’ll put you in touch with her.

I’m very lucky to have KB for a friend, and not just because of the cookies and the videotaped shows. To an Army brat like me who spent the first half of my life making and losing friends every two to three years, it’s been a very slow adjustment into adulthood friendships where people don’t just drop out of your life when you move away. As the really good things and the really bad things come, and as you realize that your family, though they may love you, don’t always know how to provide you with the support and community you need, good friends make all the difference in the world. I know this is a really simple, perhaps corny, point, but it’s one that I have to learn and relearn constantly.