Conversation with My Wife (50)
Milestones and other odd events in our lives
I have conversations with Deb about “Conversations with My Wife,” obviously. I mention that I’m working on number 50.
DEB: Oh honey! That is so neat! You should do a special one.
ME: Actually, I’m working on one about how we do directions differently.*
DEB: Okay, but what if you did one about our milestones? Like how we’ve been married to each other longer than we’ve been married altogether to anyone else?**
ME: Uh-huh. (starting to take notes)
DEB: Or how we’ve lived in this house longer than either of us has ever lived in one place.***
ME: Uh-huh.
DEB: Or how we celebrated our number fifty milestones, birthday-wise. Although I guess we didn’t do much for yours, compared to mine.****
ME: You don’t think it would all be a little rambling?
DEB: Don’t you just put all the best bits into footnotes anyway?*****
*Still am. Saved in drafts. Stay tuned.
**Deb was married about ten years for her first two marriages, combined. I didn’t quite make two years on my first one, and really six months of that was after Linda and I filed for divorce, so more like a year and a half; except most of that time we were stationed thousands of miles apart, so if you just count married time living together it would be roughly two weeks. So we’ll call it ten years altogether, Deb & I, previous marriages.
***A tad over seventeen years. We moved into our current home two months after we got married, thanks to aggressive realtors (finding a place), aggressive realtors (selling our respective places), a jaw-dropping good sellers’ market (we got full asking price for both places, and closed on Deb’s townhouse two weeks before mine despite Deb living in a “slow” neighborhood), and our house’s former owner being willing to rent to us so we could move in before the closing.
****Back when we were still in our courting phase, we would shoot emails back and forth at work, even though my cube was twenty-seven steps from her desk. In one email, I promised some day I’d take her out for her birthday to a place where the waiters would sing to her. Except I typoed “sing” as “sign”, which of course the spell-checker thought was fine. So from then on I got kidded about taking Deb to a restaurant where the staff would be frantically waving their hands in the air to “sign” Happy Birthday as the cake arrived. (My wife has a low LOL threshold when it comes to my mistakes. Standard spouse behavior.) So for her fiftieth, I consulted with my ex-wife (who knows ASL and how to use a webcam, so she videoed the signs for the lyrics) to learn how to sign the Happy Birthday Song, went to one of Deb’s favorite restaurants where I found a wonderful waitress who was delighted with the scheme, then took my wonderful wife to her birthday dinner where the cake was delivered while the waitress signed Happy Birthday.
*****Debatable.
