LOVE LIKE THIS
is one of our favorite songs from Ben Rector.      .      .
Erin and i don’t profess to have the greatest love story in the world
and that we love each other more and better than anyone else
in or out of the Universe.        .       .
and THAT’S
THE THING.          .          .
It’s not anyone else’s or competitive
it’s just
O   U   R  ‘   S

HOW I CAME TO YOU

So, it’s hard to explain
or even imagine how
I came to you
Mis-chiseled up
Broken
Discarded and trash heaped
with nothing to show for it
But everything to thank for it

First of all, they’re just numbers and we learn our 1-2-3’s at a very early age and then they become minuses and then they become additions and subtractions; they become divisions and they become multiplication too. Don’t they.    .    .these numbers, they come at us so fast and before we blink, we realize they’re days and then they’re weeks, oh yeah, they matriculate into months, and just like that.        .       .just like that, this new math tells us that they are years and how fast they come; I mean the pages of the calendar flip so fast, they could become your own natural fan in a hot room with no ventilation.

I guess that’s the good news and the bad news isn’t it?  That’s what these numbers have done to me, especially this year as I’m turning 70– that’s a number, and celebrating 45 years of ordination how could that be, but that’s a number?  And yeah, maybe.     .     .maybe the best of all 39 years of being married to a woman that is in many ways is a fantasy; a dream.  How can you marry a fantasy and let it be real flesh and bone and blood and heart, especially heart–but that’s Erin, and that’s who she’s always been and not just to me, but everybody that I know in my life right now, of course to our kids and grandkids, but literally to everyone else.

39 years ago to the day, we sat at a pool side, we had it all to ourselves because it was a Monday We were sitting there thinking that we may never see a 50th year anniversary and we still may not, but we didn’t think we would even see 39 or 40 years either because, come on, when you get to be 70 or 80 that’s old, or it seemed so when we were 30 and 31, but they too are, you guessed it, numbers, and yet after all these 39 years, I still feel that we are sitting by that pool, less than a day after we got married, older and better.    .     .      .

She’s the new math that makes sense to me. She’s all of my additions. She’s the subtraction from everything that distresses and frustrates me. She is the division that makes sure that everything has its compartment and place, and multiplication.       .      . she’s the multiplication table that holds no numbers and yet makes every second count so once upon a time’s become forevers no matter how quickly to the numbers seem to add up.

(I figured an Anniversary post deserved video parentheses)

ERIN’S

Quickly approaching the
“Oh, I can’t believe you’re 70”
phase of my life 
I was asked 
not so seriously,
“So what do you want to be for the rest of your life?”
Without a blinked pause 
I answered,
“Erin’s”

Yeah.          .          .forget all the numbers, forget all the new math,
I know as much as you’re reading this right now
what I want be for the rest of my life.            .           .
Erin’s