Still Married After All These Years

I'm having an anniversary today, though not really, with the groom in Chicago for a few days.

It's  OK I guess. We don’t mark days like this the way the greeting card people would have us do. Giving someone a card just because it’s, like, Grandmother’s Day seems to me like forcing a person to tell you he loves you: all the real feeling drains right out of the thing.

On our first anniversary in the great era of Bobby Orr Boston, we took ourselves out to celebrate at a joint set up in the old Allston Depot, designed by the great H.H. Richardson.

We couldn’t afford much but we ordered a drink apiece and some appetizers. The Clams Casino turned out to have a piece of glass in it so the manager gave us two more drinks, on the house.

That made us sure-enough giddy, kids that we were. I could almost forget I had to teach five classes the next day. David could almost stop remembering he had that crucial paper do for 'gradual' school, as one of Garp’s kids calls it in the John Irving novel.

Fun to think back and isn't that  the beauty of a blog! The way I can just write what I feel day to day.

It’s so much fun I sometimes feel I’m running some sort of scam here –except of course I don’t charge for it. I don’t have ads or links to the Aren’t I Great page that embarrasses me every time I look at it.

I tried to make it a writer of books but I was just one person.  Now I don’t care about  all that.

I guess if we're lucky we kind of turn back into the simple people we were at the beginning.

On those early anniversaries we were kids still, still  jumping out from behind doors to scare each other, still throwing cups of icy water onto the other guy in the shower.

I guess we still do some of that, come to think of it. My own favorite trick is still to sneak the shower door open when David is in there and just sort of stand there – not IN the shower stall but just outside it. Just stand there, expressionless.

He doesn’t know I’m there for the longest time because he has his eyes squeezed shut against the sting of the shampoo– until suddenly he opens them and there I am with the zombie face.  He jumps a mile, every time.

So here’s a picture of us on  Anniversary Number 25. That night we ate at Legal Sea Food with my sister Nan and my cousin Eleanor, both visiting from out of town.

Our children gave us two kittens who made things lively around here for the next dozen years.

That dress was from Costco and cost $19.95. I still have it around here somewhere.