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On one of our eighteen cruises together

Dinner and a movie was our first date,
She cooked for me delicious vegetarian stuffed peppers;
I complimented her dish, noting the absence of meat;
She’d thought I was still a vegetarian.

I’d mooed at her across a table
At the literature conference where we’d first met,
She eating a burger, me my self-righteous P, B & J,
My vegetarian days — no longer one by our first date.

The movie was “Against All Odds”,
What our friends thought about our chances;
We’re still together 33 years on, none of them are,
The odds against were steep, but love went much deeper.

You see, I fell into her eyes at the end of that night,
Inside I saw an endless future, a home for life;
I’d met my match, resistance was futile,
I dove right in and never looked back.

She almost lost her sight seven years ago;
One eye is macularly degenerated, the other still sees;
A major retinal detachment occurred in that one,
Emergency surgery had only a 75% chance of success.

But we liked those odds — not nearly as high as,
The odds against our still being together;
It worked and her vision was restored,
But later, I lost sight of those eyes, myself.

I guess it happens, but never thought it would,
I took them for granted, those eyes always there,
I stopped looking into them, lost sight of the future,
And almost lost touch with the now.

A wake-up call and a friend with a question,
Opened my eyes to a new kind of vision;
A defect I had that I never could see,
Until that moment, became so clear to me.

I let go that defect and looked for her eyes,
Still there where they always had been,
Waiting for me to awake from my slumber,
Showing the hurt, but embracing the hope.

We went out to dinner the other night,
She said, over dessert, “you never looked at your phone”,
I didn’t, a first, I was too busy, engaged,
Looking into the eyes of my life’s love.

The next night she said, “We’ve looked in
Each other’s eyes more these past three days,
Than we had in the past three years.”
I said, “Yes — it’s so good to be back home.”

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