• There’s something about nineteen

    It’s not just today, but it is today in particular.

    This is the point in this post where I start making a little sense.

    I was nineteen years old when I started dating my wife. To be clear, we weren’t married at the time. Unless a third party arranges a marriage, folks don’t typically date their spouse. The husband and wife part came later for me and mine. Folks often hear this and say, “Awh! You guys were high school sweethearts! That is SOOOOO sweet!” Then I say to myself, not out loud “I don’t know how old you were in school, but I didn’t turn eighteen until after I graduated. I was month into my sophomore year at UF when I turned nineteen.”

    Out loud, I reply, “well… not so much. We met in high school and I was sweet on her, but she was dating another guy behind my back, and turned me down when I got up the nerve to ask her out to prom. She didn’t see the light until after graduation.”

    I believe I said I’d start making a little more sense. You’ll note I didn’t say anything about being interesting let alone entertaining.

    You might ask yourself, “why do I bring this up now?” I might reply, “because I think it’s significant so hold your horses!”

    I’m not too old, relative to just about every significant person in my life not named Adam, Beth, Conner, or Eric. We had a good thing going, alphabetically, until Eric came along. However, nineteen seems like something I read about a long time ago. And that’s how long Cheryl has been my person. I knew before we started dating that I wanted to spend a long time with her, and we’ve lived our lives that way since then – not long after I turned 19 years old.

    Today is special to me for another reason, but they’re closely related. It’s our nineteenth wedding anniversary. I’m not sure many other folks think of 19 as a milestone, but I’m not most other folks. Every day is significant, but I’m a nostalgic fella. My memories are an interconnected web of thoughts, experiences, and emotions. My mind rarely stops at just one.

    So there you have it: nineteen.

    Happy anniversary Cheryl!


  • When questions get harder

    Beth wanted advice on a homework assignment for a writing class she’s taking at college this semester. Her professor wants the class to come up with two topics for a possible upcoming assignment: write a persuasive essay taking a side of an issue relevant today.

    I thought to myself, “yeah sure, possible. Like it’s possible I might take another breath before the end of the semester.”

    So far, so good?

    Here’s where the fun began. He gave a couple examples, one of which was: “climate change is a liberal myth perpetuated by a liberal media.” Beth explained she wanted to turn her professor’s example around and argue the opposite for one of her topics.

    Ho-boy! Where do I begin?

    First of all, I tried to stay calm – a feat made easier by a muscle relaxer taken an hour earlier to calm down some neck pain. I didn’t want to say something like, “Man, it sounds like your professor is a f…ing idiot.” She’s smart enough to come to this conclusion herself. Plus, I didn’t want to encourage an adversarial relationship with someone responsible for giving her a grade. I went that route my freshman year at UF and it didn’t turn out well.

    I’m trying to cut down on my swearing. So lets just say, I had English teacher whose head was stuck pretty far up someplace that’s usually inaccessible to one’s own head.

    It was one of the few times I got less than an A in a class at UF, and I started the semester a seventeen year old, know-it-all teenager. She’s a fifteen year old, know-it-all teenager, who hasn’t graduated from high school yet, and an average of four years younger than the rest of the class. I feared she might not fare as well.

    My next thought was, should I give the guy some slack? Maybe he was playing the role of provocateur to get some neurons firing, rather than being an ideologue trying to push an ill-informed worldview ON MY DAUGHTER!

    Finally, I tried to find a middle path. She knows how I feel on the subject, as we’ve discussed it many times. I told her I was proud of her desire to take up the cause, but this wasn’t the right place. Plus, I didn’t think it served a possible purpose of the exercise: to write a reasoned essay defending a position on an issue that might not be familiar (now), or one she might not even hold. Giving the guy the benefit of doubt, I thought it could turn out to be a good exercise in critical thought.

    Plus, I thought merely taking his example and turning it around lacked creativity. There are LOTS of problems in the world worthy of a little persuasion.

    I’ll tell you one thing. It makes me yearn for her early years when the questions were easy, like explaining redshift.

    The astronomical phenomenon, in case you were wondering.


  • Someone’s birthday

    I’m hoping you’ll read this one, even If you ignore most of my posts.

    Tomorrow is Cheryl’s birthday. She’s not going to get what she deserves because it’s impossible to quantify. She’s not going to get what she’s worth because everything is beyond my means.

    Instead, she’s going to get up and do what she does every Friday: wake up, take the kids to school, go to work, come home for a short nap, wake up, go to job number two, and work security at the hospital until the sun rises on another day – when she’ll do much of it again. She’ll do it without complaint. She’ll do it for me and her other kids.

    So do this for me.

    I take that back.

    Do this for her. Show Cheryl a little love tomorrow on her birthday. It’s not everything but it’s something and that isn’t nothing.

    And if this post comes across as off the charts corny you’ll do it anyway, right?