Throughout our lives friends enclose us like pairs of parentheses. They shift our boundaries; crater our terrain. They fume through the cracks of our tentative houses and parts of them always remain. Friendship asks the truth and wants the truth, hollows and fills, ages with us, and we through it. It cradles us like family. It is ecology and mystery and language - all three. Our grown-up friendships - especially the really meaningful ones- model for our children what we want them to have throughout their lives.