Milestones, yet another. . .

There's been so many mile markers as of late that I can't help thinking we live on an interstate. Next week, our oldest grandchild repeats marriage vows with her high school beau, who's just now--today actually--coming home from a National Guard deployment at Guantanamo. I told her I wanted to come along when she greets him at the airport. "Haha," she said, in a text. 

I'm sure she's excited. In little more than a week the two of them will be married. A little risky maybe, but I'm a grandpa who altogether too easily forgets that a six-month deployment hardly means absence in this technological age. I mean, I'm quite sure they checked in--Facetime or something--just about every day. He's been gone, but certainly not forgotten nor unseen. Absence hasn't had a chance to make the heart grow fonder; like everything else, absence has gone digital. 

And today, July 14, my companion and partner for the last fifty years has a birthday. I won't say how many, although it's just upward from biblically-warranted three score and ten, but not much. After six months of being the younger of us, she's catching up now, as she always does.

I've said it before, but it is a milestone so I'll say it again: we got married in a fever fifty years ago, June 27, 1972. When we left the reception at the Northwestern Commons, the female beside me wore an outfit that her granddaughter, fifty years later, audibly admired when this old photo came up on a family slide show we put up in Arizona. This outfit--

Good night, what a "going away." Still sets my heart wildly aflame.

I don't remember how we spent her first birthday as a married woman. We lived in a ramshackle place in my Wisconsin hometown, a place my parents discovered when they looked for something to rent for us. I had a job at park I'd worked at during summers when I was in college. Of that short time--just a month or so before we left for Arizona--I remember very little. One afternoon an old high school buddy pounded on the door hard and long enough to wake the dead. Neither of us were, but neither were we inclined just then to leave the bed. That event made it into a story.

Early August and we were off for Iowa, to say goodbye to her folks, and then began the magical mystery tour to Arizona, that little orange VW squareback tugging a U-haul trailer. I can't imagine how I could be that much of an idiot. 

But we made it, and we're still together, a half-century later, me and the birthday girl. For fifty years we've been together, and that woman in that picture is just as beautiful as she ever was, or so saith the man she married long, long ago.

Another milestone. 

Our granddaughter won't read this, I'm sure--she's too busy right now with her good buddy around again and the wedding a week away. But I couldn't ask for more of a blessing for them, that one day, fifty years from now, they'll look at each and smile and remind themselves of ye olde line--how time flies when you're having fun.

Happy birthday, Barbara Kay.