forty fond memories

1. driving to pennsylvania in a snowstorm, eating corn chips and chi-chi’s salsa and pondering life.
2. stopping on the hill outside the zondervan library to watch the sunset
3. driving baref00t to pick me up at my dom for a study date
4. listening to all of Misplaced Childhood through in one night, followed immediately by all of my favourite Dead album (terrapin station)
5. making a turkey dinner in your studio apartment fort wayne
6. eating bagels with pineapple and cream cheese on february 15th after you drove through another snowstorm to be with me
7. going to the gas city park to feed the ducks
8. watching paul simon’s concert in central park in our living room without any furniture when we’d been married for about 6 weeks
9. buying our first sofa (which I took a nap on this morning)
10. doing our laundry at the apartment complex’s laundry room and playing chess outside at the picnic table between loads
11. buying our own washer and dryer after the romanticism of playing chess got old.
12. playing chess in the conservatory at the opryland hotel
13. renting a car and driving down to disneyworld for our belated honeymoon
14. deciding to try to have a baby
15. all the times we thought we might be pregnant
16. all the times it turned out we weren’t, and you were still there anyway
17. driving down to the bellevue mall to look at stuff we couldn’t afford and dream about a day when we could.
18. driving to murfreesboro for your grad school classes and talking about the coursework on the way home.
19. all the MMPIs, Rorschachs and IQ tests I took to help you with your psychometrics class
20. the night you made the world’s best spaghetti dinner for our anniversary
21. flying to bermuda on that small plane and feeling kind of overwhelmed yet bold
22. laughing at the fact that the elbow beach hotel in bermuda gives you jars of cashews that look like miniature elbows
23. driving out to the back of beyond and being scared to death we were gonna get killed–all so we could look at american eskimo puppies, which you didn’t even want.
24. driving that same afternoon to coffee county to look at bernese mountain dog puppies that I didn’t even want.
25. buying one of each dog
26. sitting in the rainy parking lot of uncle bud’s and deciding to make an offer on our house even though it wasn’t the one we wanted at first
27. laying on the floor playing with our two puppies while some dude installed our alarm system in the basement
28. sitting on our back deck reading our books while we grilled out our supper.
29. driving to toronto and noticing that all the semi trucks in Canada had green cabs.
30. sneaking to a showing of Jurassic Park in Stroudsburg without your parents finding out that we went to the movies
31. hanging out in our living room waiting for trickortreaters on the first halloween in our new house and realising that we had about thirty times the amount of candy we needed
32. our anniversary dinner at Arthur’s
33. the odd valentine’s dinner at the hotel in Bermuda where it seemed like we’d traveled back to 1956
34. decorating our apartment for christmas the last year we lived there by hanging hundreds of paper snowflakes from the living room ceiling.
35. seeing Pink Floyd at Vanderbilt
36. seeing the Dead at Deer Creek and having them play Terrapin.
37. driving the back road behind the airport at night just to see all the lights
38. that horrible drive to Pennsylvania without any sleep and how good our nap and dinner were once we finally made it to Lancaster.
39. Testing paint swatches on the wall of our garage.
40. feeding the stingrays.

Happy 40th birthday, bear.   I know I missed the first 21, but I hope I get 40 more with you.  Oh, and your glasses are smokin’!!!