Our 39-Year-Long Honeymoon Continues

Our 39-Year-Long Honeymoon Continues

Who would have thought a love affair could last so long and continue so intense?

This Fall we well celebrate our 40th Anniversary.

Ginny and I have no idea why our relationship flourishes as it does. We don’t feel as though we do anything special or different from other couples, but something clicks for us. We think we are recipients of God’s grace.

Most of the day Saturday we sat in our garden watching the grass grow and the birds fuss at feeders while we talked, continuing a conversation we started in 1968. We compared the relative merits of white grapes and red grapes. We compared the relative merits of various presidential candidates. We talked about the ambitions we had as highschool students and how life dealt us a different hand from the one we expected. We talked about books and movies and tv shows and vacation plans and home repairs and sex problems and picnics and crime statistics and how computers have changed our life.

Then we floated on air mattresses in the pool holding hands and talking about animals and our children and insurance policies and changes in our garden and how June Cleaver, Beaver’s mother on 1950s tv, dressed in heels and pearls to vacuum her house.

While Ginny, across the yard from me, attended to Fancy, her caged bird named for Fancy Feast Cat Food, I watched her work and offered prayers of thanksgiving. That such a beautiful woman could love me is the mystery, glory and secret joy of my life. Ginny is the best thing that’s ever happened to me.

We drove to Crabby Ben’s for a late seafood lunch. We carried our books inside and sat munching fried shrimp while reading and ignoring eachother in companionable silence. Gin read a murder mystery set in Martha’s Vineyard; I read a book on Florida paleontology.

I laughed on reading an explanation of how one fossil pit on our west coast contains the bones of land dwellers such as a giant, 20-foot-tall sloth and smaller tree-dwelling sloth, as well as the bones of bison, oxen, armadillo, and saber-toothed cats mixed with the bones of marine creatures such as whales, sharks, catfish and turtles. Land and sea creatures all mixed in one fossil layer.

The book speculates that one day the land animals, including tree-dwellers, decided to swim west in the Gulf of Mexico and they all were attacked by sharks or drowned.

That’s so much more reasonable that attributing such fossil beds to Noah’s Flood, isn’t it.

I form a mental picture of a sloth climbing down from a tree and going swimming with a burrowing armadillo.

Oh well, to each his own.

As Sunday’s highpoint Mark and Eve invited us to dinner and to see the new condo they moved into two weeks ago. It’s a charming new home for them as they begin their fifth month of marriage.

This week Mark received word of a promotion increasing his responsibilities, authority and pay check.

Three Cheers For Mark!

My computer was down for six weeks, so when I checked my accounts I was surprised to find that my books from my on-line book catalog have continued to sell – without my supervision.
I don’t know how they could do that without my checking on them daily.

As an extra surprise, last week I received an unexpected royalty check from a company for an edition of one of my books published in the Philippine Islands a couple of years ago.

Honestly, I’d forgotten that book even existed till I got this check for it.

Could it be that my work carries on without me?

Just before my computer burned out, I investigated marketing plans to sell my books. For my local history things I thought of placing ads on local restaurant placemats. I’m not sure if that’s the way to go or not.

When I made some calls, I found that placemat marketing can prove expensive.

No Problem.

Money is no object – my wife works.