Not Bad. Not Bad at All.

Today we celebrated our 43rd wedding anniversary by going out. E. is off to Florida shortly to see the sister who is her 97.5-year-old mom's caregiver through a hip replacement. We needed some calm before that storm, so we didn't eat in and invite.

It doesn't seem as if we've been married 43 years, though that particular statement suggests we've had other 43-year-long experiences by which to measure, and this experience seems different.

Not the case at all. I suppose we mean that we imagine that the weight of the passing of time should have some special metric, that duration must effloresce some sort of incremental meaning, that somehow it does not feel as if we have been together that long even though we are not sure just how that feeling should feel, that we still have much to learn about each other and procedures to work out and treaties to ratify, that the sense of relish is still fresh, that the well of pain and wonder is not dry.

I don't know. We have been married a long time, and I still remember the first time I saw her -- walking away from me with a superb articulation of her constituents of motion that seized my attention and caused my lizard brain to bark at the moon.

Which is a considerable image. That of a lizard. Barking at the moon. Everything starts somewhere, and if it keeps going, why second
guess?