Tick Tock

I am on the clock. Ten minutes to write and then five to edit.

One of the things that has always embarrassed me about my blog is all the names I have run through, in the spirit of the garage band. It's not the music. It's the name. (Time for a joke: I have changed the name of this blog more often than Gerald Ford changes his Depends.)

This latest renaming is shall we say eponymous?

I will now be the 15 minute man. I will do the thing the name promises.

I just checked the Polder Digitial Clock Timer. Four minutes to go until editing!

Anywho, my Lady Wife and I just celebrated our 40th. In fact, we didn't celebrate it. We *noted* it by spending a weekend in San Francisco, a journey of about 30 minutes. Afterwards, I did not so much mention as was overheard saying that we were at 4-0 and a friend decided there should be an event. Using his own personal and eccentric list of those he considered our friends -- a list from which he had eliminated all those with whom he had recently had loud and bitter fights and these were quite a few -- he got about 15 people around a big square table at a Chinese restaurant in Berkeley.

And among those 15 people were some we hadn't seen in years since, as I said, it was his own personal and eccentric list.

I liked it. There was a free meal involved, plus some gifts. But Eydie and I were...uncertain. Should being married that long be a cause for public celebration?

Ah, the chime sounds and it's time to edit. Let me make my point bald and simple. Simply being married for 40 years is not in itself a cause for acclaim. We have friends who have been through many happy divorces and are happy in their current relationship, which is merely the last of many. We know one or two long-married couples that could use some divorcing. Or so it seems to us.

Personally, I think we should keep the celebrating to ourselves, since we are the only ones with any sense of whether or not it should be a celebration.

Oh, I'm almost over the limit. Time to edit and to link to the party pictures. Which is okay for me to do. Anyone who reads this far must be at least mildly curious and the pictures themselves are...

...mildly curious.

Wordplay, my friends, wordplay, though I don't have time to look up the exact rhetorical technique.