It's our anniversary!

Tracy and I were sitting on the couch last night just after the clock struck midnight marveling that we had been married for five years and together for a total of eleven. The words “time flies” flew out of one of our mouths, I’m not sure whose, it doesn’t matter. The better phrase for the passage of time at this point in our lives is probably “time disappears,” because we so quickly lose track of it.

I told Tracy that driving back from the store the other day, it occurred to me how happy I am with the regularity of our lives. Each day that passes is pretty much like the the one before it. We get up, we make coffee, we feed the animals — the cats and dog inside, the squirrels and birds outside — we have some yogurt and I have toast, and we sit down to peruse the news of what happened since we went to bed the night before. Occasionally, one of us will call across the room to the other, asking whether we had seen a story about a court victory or loss, or a photograph of some version of excess or another, or maybe a YouTube video of a cat that has begun nursing a baby possum rescued from a roadside.

Once a week or so, we’ll go to the diner for lunch, and then each and every day, we take a nap, arising in time for me to start complaining that I haven’t come up with a topic for a column, with Tracy inevitably reminding me that I had written something down that she told me to make a note of earlier, and wasn’t that enough for a column?

The inside animals get their evening feeding from Tracy, and she sits down to make notes for her own column, or finishes collecting photos and writing about them on Substack, and I start writing about the subject I had been reminded to “write down” earlier. When we’re both finished, we either cook a quick dinner we had planned previously or heat up soup from “Spoonful” down Harford Street a few blocks from us. Surrounded by our animals, Ruby lying on a pillow on the chair next to me and Tuli on Tracy’s lap, sometimes joined by his brother, Uno, we watch one of our shows or a movie and go to bed and wake up, and the whole thing starts all over again.

We’ve been playing this song nearly note for note even longer than we’ve been married. In fact, one of the notes just few by me, a furry ball thrown by Tracy for Ruby; Little showed up on my desk for her late afternoon crispies; dusk falls and sparrows flit through the branches of the big bush outside my window looking for a place to perch for the night. We know the music, and each other, by heart.

Running across the top of my oversize monitor, I can see the pages I’ve got open for tomorrow’s column on the Iran-Iraq war which started in 1980, asking the question, isn’t there anybody at the Pentagon or in the White House who studied how many missiles those two countries expended in eight years of fighting that killed several hundred thousand of each other’s soldiers?

See? It all begins again. And just think! Next year comes another anniversary to look forward to. Will wonders never cease?