Two Years

Saturday, February 21, 2009, by the grace of God, and my Beloved Barbara, I was married and began a new life, again. Every one of the days of the past two years has been better than I deserve or could have reasonably expected.

Thank you, Sweetheart.

The One Hundred and Fifty-first Day

Today my sweetie and I have been married five months. Scary and wonderful, marked by many adjustments, the day finds us happy still. I say it is a miracle she can put up with me, and she says the same – I mean that she claims the miracle is the other way around, that the endurance is mine. We are both right, and both wrong.

Marriage is mutual giving and taking, hard to get right, as we both have prior reason to know. We are looking forward to what comes next, which may be the happiest state two people can attain.

Happy Anniversary, Sweetheart.

Fading: The Greatest Generation

Two sixty-five year marks were reached this year, one broadly historic and social, another purely personal to me. A couple of months ago, I observed my sixty-fifth birthday. Today, it has been sixty-five years since the massive invasion of Europe set in motion the last eleven months of the Third Reich.

The first two months of my life were spent in a world consumed in a colossal struggle between Allied forces and the Nazi and Japanese military machines, with most of Europe and Asia dominated by our adversaries in each theatre. Millions of men and women, including my young father, were thousands of miles away from home, forged into armies and navies contending for the future of freedom as defined by the western democracies. Truly, these millions earned the later descriptive title of “The Greatest Generation.” They fought and died and suffered wounds, prevailed in battle and returned home to build lives and a peacetime rebirth of those nations their enemies sought to destroy.

This morning, newspapers and broadcast programs reported once more on the accomplishments of this band of brothers and sisters. As has been the case increasingly over the past decade or two, mention of the thinning ranks of living veterans sounded an elegiac note. The youngest of still living veterans from that cataclysmic war are in their early eighties. Stories this morning all told of how few were still able to gather at any distance from their homes, much less re-visit the far scenes of their struggles, or the foreign cemeteries where many of their comrades have lain since after the war.

A day will come when there shall no longer be any survivors of that war, as it came for veterans of World War I, and all the other wars before. Their names will become legend, their personal memories preserved only in their families and friends left behind, for a little while.

Selah, good and faithful servants – thank you all.

Three Months and Counting

Yesterday and today my Beloved and I noted the approach and arrival of our three-month anniversary; we were married three months ago today. We agree that life is good. Still settling into a routine of married folks who come  home to the same house each day, without having to wonder if we are due at the other’s place that night.

Unpacking my junk and rearranging furniture and shelving books and hanging clothes and  shoveling out miscellaneous papers still occupy us, with slow progress. But we have the rest of our lives together to shape a home and a routine that suits us.

Happy anniversary, Sweetheart, I don’t deserve this happiness but gladly seize it daily. Love, love, love and love in overplus.