- Today is my husband's thirty-eighth birthday.
- I met him when he was nineteen. Nineteen and three-quarters, so he hasn't known me half his life quite yet.
- I was seventeen, a freshman, and he seemed like savoir-faire personified.
- Plus, he was cute. Oh, my, did I pine for him. We started dating in January of 1988. I was studying for a Latin quiz, translating some forgotten Plautus passage, when he came down to my room. He kissed me. He's been kissing me ever since.
- He likes shellfish, and Scotch whiskey, and chamber music, and long elaborate wargames with so many rules that they cause Talmudic scholars to blanch and flee. "Want to play a game?" he asked me that first fall, and I agreed, envisioning an afternoon of Monopoly. Instead he pulled out Axis and Allies. Two hours later I said numbly, "I have to go [stick a fork in my eye]."
- We don't play wargames. We rarely have time for games at all now, but we do play a fierce game of Scrabble every now and again. I get a little too keyed up about Scrabble, though, and see it as a moral failing if I score less than 325 points. He secretly thinks this is ridiculous. Anyone knows the moral failing threshold is 350. (Ha! I'm kidding! Um, mostly.)
- We broke up messily during my sophomore year. On Valentine's Day, actually. I spent a wretched week not eating and not sleeping, with Patsy Cline, Aretha Franklin, and Melissa Etheridge sharing the turntable.
- We had turntables then. He had something like twelve linear feet of vinyl. I thought it was extravagant of him to plan on buying a CD player eventually when he had such a good setup already. Isn't that quaint?
- We spent the rest of the school year sort of broken up and sort of seeing each other. I thought I'd never see him again. He was supposed to be graduating and going into the Navy.
- That summer I spent a lot of time thinking about where I was going. The preceding year, a hard-drinking, soul-sucking year, had been brutal. Tentatively, I sought God. I don't have to be bitter about all that anymore, I said to myself. I'm going to let it go now.
- A few days later a 47-page letter from Elwood arrived. "I can't stop thinking about you," it said. "I can't eat and I can't sleep." That's sweet of him, I thought to myself. I have no interest in a long-distance relationship with the man who broke my heart, but it's still nice to hear he misses me.
- My family was going to be in Florida the next week. He was going to be in Florida the next week. He drove up to the Gulf Coast to see me. I still remember the way my heart leapt when I saw him at the door.
- Let's try it again, he said. I'm sorry about last year. Bad idea, said my head. But my heart wrested the microphone away and said, Yes! Let's! Oh, I've missed you.
- He grew up Catholic but was agnostic when I met him. In the Navy he encountered God and has been faithfully, unostentatiously serving him ever since.
- We agreed that a commitment to Christ required us to be chaste.
- Which was hard. Awfully hard. But we stuck with it anyway.
- We were married five days after my 23rd birthday -- it was a day brimming over with happiness. He wanted to get married on my 23rd birthday so he'd only have one date to remember, but it fell on a Monday that year. His great-uncle married his great-aunt on her birthday -- February 14. He asked me if I'd consider changing my birthday to February 14, but I declined.
- He used to be the least time-aware person I knew. He has changed since the boys came along, but sometimes the weeks still sneak up on him. "Your mother's birthday is next week," I'll tell him. Inevitably he says, "Already?" I'm going to put that on his tombstone.
- His mother invited an Elvis impersonator to our wedding reception. In costume. We were surprised.
- Elwood reads essayists for pleasure. Nineteenth-century fiction, not so much. His desert island shelf would have Montaigne and Brodsky. Maybe Thucydides. Dickens? Thackeray? Voted off the island without a moment of remorse.
- Last month he told me for the nineteenth year running that next year is the Cubs' year for sure.
- He excels at gifts that are practical with a fillip of luxury. When we were in college I rarely wore socks, even in the dead of winter, and so one year for Christmas he gave me (among other gifts) a box with a dozen pairs of cozy socks in cheerful colors. I still wear the hot pink ones. When Marty was a baby Elwood bought me a gorgeous black leather bag. I was afraid to carry it for a long time, afraid it was too pretty and I'd damage it. But I have decided that slightly scuffed in the course of appreciative use is better than perfect in the closet.
- He makes me laugh and laugh and laugh, sometimes with just a gesture or an eye roll.
- He cranks the heat so high in the van that I think he is secretly raising orchids in there. (Very hardy orchids, that can withstand the freezing temperatures they are subjected to during the other 167 hours in the week.) He has always liked it to be 158 degrees in the car. I asked him about this early in our marriage: How come I'm always hot in the car, when you're cold, and I'm always cold in the house, when you're hot? He explained: That's because I'm normal, and you're a space alien.
- The memory still makes me laugh so hard I have to stop typing for a minute. I wish I could duplicate the delivery for you, because it doesn't look that funny, I know, but it was hilarious.
- He is right there for me when I am having a hard time emotionally. He is in my corner like nobody else. This took a long time -- I used to feel alone when I got emotional -- but he is my staunchest ally now. (Lest I make him out to be too saintly, let me acknowledge that this gets more complicated if I'm upset about something in our marriage.)
- He always sings every song at Mass.
- His grade school music teacher told me, "Elwood P. Gladly just can't carry a tune."
- Of course he can. It just took him longer than she expected to figure it out. I like a man who is persistent.
- He is forever surprising me with the things he knows. Like when Moxie left a comment about U Thant ages ago, and I said, "???" -- Elwood P. said, "U Thant. The former UN Secretary-General. From Myanmar, although of course it was Burma at the time."
- He is indestructible at Trivial Pursuit and related games. He is the Six-bladed Power Mower of Death at Trivial Pursuit. But if someone puts one of those wedge pieces in sideways, he might get distracted enough prying it out to miss a softball question. Keep this strategy in mind if you are not on his team.
- He hates when people are careless with game pieces, because he loves games of all kinds.
- He says the nicest things about me to other people. Once we were in a married couples group through our church. We were supposed to go around in a circle and share something we loved about our spouses. (All the men reading this go "AAaaaaggghhh!" in unison.) Elwood said: Jamie has a beautiful soul.
- He tells me my exterior is beautiful as well, no matter what shape, no matter how unvarnished. He prefers it when I don't wear makeup.
- He has beautiful hands -- square and strong. I wrote a sonnet about them my sophomore year. (Now that is an embarrassing admission.)
- The thing he misses most about life without kids, I think, is backpacking. Or perhaps silence, but then the silence is one of the things he loves about backpacking. We have hiked in the backcountry of the Grand Canyon, the Grand Tetons, Arapaho National Forest, and Mt. Rainier (for our honeymoon -- best week ever).
- I love to watch him with our boys. He is such a good dad: generous, attentive, patient.
- He loves blueberries. He doesn't love waking up early. Instead of Blueberry Morning he'd prefer Blueberry Elevenses, with a Times, enough quiet to read it in, and a cup of black coffee at his elbow.
For years now I have been chewing on a song about our marriage. The trouble with writing a song about your husband is that you get a verse written and then he goes and gives you a trash compactor for Valentine's Day and it makes you want to revise the verse so it says "She saw the trash compactor / And angrily she whacked her- / self upside the head / She should have married Ted." And then the Bad Lyric Police haul you away and it's years of legal nonsense before you can think about songwriting again. (NB: only a fictional example; I am a low-maintenance gift recipient and I don't fuss about Valentine's Day.)
More to the point, I started writing it after a friend had Kahlil Gibran's marriage poem read at her wedding. I can't quite finish it (because what would be next? a song about avocado appliances?) but I can't quite let it go either. It goes like this: Like two trees planted together... [many bad draft lines deleted but some non-clunky thing about reaching upward and bearing fruit will eventually go in this space, followed by:] ...Love is sweeter when it's ripe than when it's green.
Here's to ripe, Elwood P. Gladly. Happy birthday.
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