Deborah blew off work on her birthday yesterday, which meant that I did the same thing, more or less. When I’m working from home, it’s always a risk. My friend Reflux was in town from San Francisco and asked if we were available to meet him for lunch. “My treat,” he said. Never one to reject a person’s generosity, we accepted.

We met him at a southern-fried comfort food restaurant near his New York office and sat down for catfish and twenty questions, beginning with, “How’s married life?”

“Good.”

“Are you still thinking about leaving the city?”

“If by thinking, you mean fantasizing, then yes, we’re still thinking about leaving New York. But no, we’re not doing any planning.”

“Where would you go?”

The question caused my brain to leak so much voltage that my mouth couldn’t move. A brief moment to recharge and I answered: “Who knows?”

“How about kids? Any plans for kids?”

“No plans.”

“Your parents must be hinting about that, no? Any pressure?”

“Deborah’s father told her she’s too old to have kids,” I said. “He told her they won’t come out right, they’ll be retarded.”

“Well, there is some truth to that, I’m afraid,” said Reflux. “But, if you don’t mind my asking, how old are you Deborah.”

She’s told him before, and she told him again.

“Why do I always think you’re younger than that?”

“I got an ‘old joke’ birthday card this morning,” she said. “My first one.”

“Oh no, the old joke birthday card. Brutal. But you’re still young enough to have kids. Or you could adopt. An Art Director I used to work with, remember him, Jamie? He recently left San Francisco, took a new job and moved back to New York. He’s mixing his baby batter with a doner egg and a surrogate mom and now he’s having twins. A boy and a girl. A middle aged gay guy living alone in New York City suddenly having two kids. Talk about a lifestyle change.”

Deborah just shook her head at the whole business. Aside from her two cats, she has no pressing maternal urge.

“It’s hard for me to say this,” said Reflux. “I love both my kids dearly, and they add a whole new dimension to my life, but there is something to be said for being free and unencumbered.”

“Is that what this is called?” I wanted to know.

“Speaking of which, you guys have to come out to visit.”

Reflux has been living in San Francisco for a few years now, and I still haven’t managed to take him up on the offer. As he tortured us with descriptions of his laid-back California lifestyle in swanky Mill Valley, I added him to a long and growing list of people we can’t afford to visit. Not right now, anyway. He’s already beginning to talk about eventually moving back east. Hopefully time and money will align for a visit before he does.

When we’d finished eating, our waitress brought the check along with a questionnaire for each of us. “If you fill these out,” she said, dealing them like cards, “We send you information about special events, and every year on your birthday you can come in for free food.”

“Really?” said Deborah. “Today’s my birthday.”

“Today?” the waitress said, surprised, and maybe only half-believing. “Sorry, I can’t do anything about it today. But next year.”

“In other words, she has to wait the longest of any of us,” I said.

The waitress shrugged and slipped away.

“I’m not filling that thing out,” I said. “They just want to steal my identity.”

We lingered for a while, Deborah drawing absent-minded swirls all over the questionnaires while we finished our conversation.

3. What’s your favorite sport?

Doodling.

After lunch, we ran some errands around town, then went to Brooklyn to pick up a small chocolate cake from the bakery where Deborah does bookkeeping. By the time we got home, Deborah wasn’t sure she still felt like having a semi-fancy birthday dinner of periwinkles and champagne like we’d planned, and asked if we could do it the next day. Of course we could, I told her, “Whatever you want. It’s your birthday.”

But after sitting home for a half hour she shook off her birthday depression and changed her mind again. “If we don’t go tonight,” she said, “I’m afraid we never will.”

“Put your shoes on, let’s go.”