Sunday, I got together with a group of ladies to celebrate our friend Nancy’s 60th birthday.

Her birthday is actually March 26th, but her sister decided to get Nancy’s friends together a couple weeks earlier so it would be a surprise. Janis made up some sort of ruse. And Nancy, sure enough, was surprised when she walked into her sister’s suburban living room to see friends that she had acquired over the past forty years.

Janis sweated over the details – getting in touch with the guests, transforming her den into a mini banquet hall, excavating old black and white photos of childhood Nancy from largely untouched boxes — and somehow managing to keep the whole thing a secret.

But we came. And, as each guest arrived, the card table Janis unfolded in front of her fire place began filling up with colorfully wrapped boxes and bags. We drank wine, exchanged gossip, and struggled with our cameras (We all seemed to know how to take snaps, but not how to review the images we just captured). After eating, Nancy sat on a chair facing the group and started unwrapping her special day’s presents and reading cards. Every gift that was opened and every card that was read was passed around too. That’s just the way we do things, I guess.

As we watched Nancy unwrap, read, and reminisce, Janis, who was over the rainbow delighted that her planning and obsessing had not been for nothing, declared how happy she was to do this for her baby sister; her sister who was almost exactly two years younger.

“When’s your birthday?” I asked Janis.

“March 30th,” she replied

Nancy paused for a moment to share a memory.

“You know, when I was a kid, I had the hardest time understanding that Janis was older than me because my birthday came earlier in the month than hers did.”

At this point one of the other guests perked up.

“Me too. I was born in November, on the eighteenth, and my older sister’s birthday was November 24th and I couldn’t understand why she was older since we celebrated my birthday first.

“You think that’s a crazy understanding,” one of the other ladies began. “When I was young, I used to think cows were all women and horses were all men.”

We all began howling with laughter; the good kind. We all saw ourselves in each other. We all could have made confessions about things we weren’t especially proud of but which made us very human.

Being in the company of friends where you can speak of your less than shining moments is no small thing.