The First 42 Years...

...have been an adventure. Forty-two years ago on a Thursday morning in Cook County Courthouse, Chicago Illinois, my dearly beloved and I were wed. We'd intended to be married the next Saturday, but the minister called to say that he would not be available. We went to the courthouse to get the license and decided we'd come back to the courthouse on Saturday to be married, but the clerk warned us that there would be a long wait on Saturday, and hinted that the judge was available right then.

So, with no to-do we exchanged our vows before a judge, and left the building to walk along the Chicago River to the car we'd borrowed to make the trip from the suburbs to the city. Tony asked if I felt married, and I said no.

We had to be at work at 2:30 and we didn't have any food in our new apartment, so we went grocery shopping. (We always say we spent our honeymoon at the Jewell Tea Grocery.) We rushed to the apartment, put the groceries away, and hurried to work. An inauspicious start to a long and happy partnership.

We have had a wonderful life together. We are wealthy in all that matters. We have wonderful children, and love each other with a depth we could not even begin to imagine the day we wed. Today we got the following message from our younger son Zak and his wife Mandy.

Hello My Dears,

The public domain has been much on my mind much as of late. My thoughts before drifting off to sleep are often on the debt owed to the future for the gifts bestowed by the past.

Today, it will have been 42 years that the two of you have been one - a gift to each other and to those who share your life with you.

The gifts that you have bestowed on us are many and, of them all, the gifts of being loved and of being able to love is by far the greatest.

Today, of all days, we hope that you are well and that you feel how much we love you both.

Zak & Mandy

p.s. Speaking of the public domain, here is a lovely illustration by Dulac from an English adaption of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. The poem that goes with the illustration is well-known:

Here with a Loaf of Bread beneath the Bough,
A Flask of Wine, a Book of Verse - and Thou
Beside me singing in the Wilderness -
And Wilderness is Paradise enow.

.. but another of Omar's quattrains serves just as well:

Yes, Loved One, when the Laughing Spring is blowing,
With Thee beside me and the Cup o’erflowing,
I pass the day upon this Waving Meadow,
And dream the while, no thought on Heaven bestowing.

On to the adventures of the next 42 years!