Karim, 31

He stopped explaining things he hadn't yet finished.

This was, by my count, the year's real change — and it took until April for me to notice, and until July to say so out loud. Four years in, I can tell you what is hardest to learn about him: he is, by default, a finisher. He does not, by nature, want to be watched mid-sentence. This year he let me watch. He let me ask. He let me, twice, read the half-page from the morning, the one he had not yet decided was a paragraph. That is the year I will keep. — N.

He still phones his older sister on Sunday afternoons.

From Cairo, on a Sunday in late September, at five in the afternoon Cairo time, which is ten in the morning his time, which is the hour he is most himself. I am thirty-five and he is thirty-one and I have been older than him for thirty-one years and I have, on every one of those Sundays for the last decade, called him first. This year he started calling me first. I noticed. I have not, until now, said so. Happy birthday, ya akhi. — Layla

My darling Karim.

You are thirty-one. Your father and I are both eighty-three this year, in good health, and writing this to you from the kitchen in Marblehead on a Sunday morning. We came from Beirut in 1981 with two suitcases and a baby (your sister) and we have, in the forty-five years since, built a life that has, somehow, produced you. We did not, when we left, know what an American thirty-one would look like in our family. It looks like you. It looks, on the Sunday in August when you came home for the weekend, like a man who reads at the table and helps with the washing-up without being asked. That is, in our family, what we hoped for. We love you very much, habibi. — Mama.

He is, finally, writing in the mornings.

I was his editor at the magazine from 2019 through 2022 and I remember, in the autumn of 2021, telling him at the bar around the corner from the office that he would, eventually, do his real work first thing in the morning, before the day got into him. He nodded politely and continued, for three years, to file at midnight. This summer, at a reading downtown in July, he told me he had been writing at six in the morning for ten weeks. I asked what had changed. He said, "I stopped explaining what I was working on." I have not, in twenty-six years of editing writers, heard a better answer. Many happy returns, Karim. — Eleanor.

Uncle Karim is the best because he reads to me on FaceTime.

My name is Adam and I am eight years old and Karim is my uncle and I am writing this with mama because she said I can write whatever I want for his birthday. He reads to me on FaceTime on Sundays when we call from Cairo and he reads the WHOLE chapter, not just one page like Baba does. Last Sunday he read the part of the Iron Giant where the giant goes back into the sea and I cried a small amount and he did not laugh. He is thirty-one and that is very old. Happy birthday Uncle Karim. I love you. — Adam.

He decided, in April, to start running again.

And because we have, since the third week of freshman year in 2013, been doing the same things in the same order at roughly the same speed, I also, in May, started running again. I am writing this from a desk in Chicago at half past ten on a Wednesday and I have, this morning, run six miles, which is on him. The book I am writing about a translator I love is also, in some quiet way, on him — he is the one who, in February in Mexico City, said, "write it the way you would tell me about it." Thirty-one looks good on you, K. The book will get there. — D.

He arrived for the long run, in October, six minutes late.

This was, by Karim's standards, an event of geological significance. We have, since meeting at the Prospect Park track in March, run together on Saturday mornings forty-one times. He has been late once. He apologised twice. I want, on the occasion of his thirty-first, to note for the record that the man runs the second half faster than the first half, every single week, which is not how anyone is supposed to do it, and which is, somehow, exactly how he does most things. Many happy returns, brother. The track is open on Saturday. — James.

He came to Mexico City in February and stayed five days.

I moved here in the autumn of 2024 and Karim was the first of the old crowd to come — on a Tuesday morning in February, off the red-eye, in a black overcoat that was, frankly, the wrong coat for Mexico City in February. He told me, sitting on the roof of my apartment in Roma Norte on the second evening with the city blue underneath us, that he had been waiting to come for a year and a half, and had been, in that year and a half, working out what he was waiting for. I said: you were waiting to be the kind of person who could come. He looked at me for a long time and said, yes. Thirty-one looks brave on you, Kar. Come back in February. The roof is still here. — Dani.