Did You Miss Me?

I didn’t post yesterday because I spent the entire lunch hour with Mary. Dear, sweet, wonderful Mary. How can I help but believe in miracles when I realize that thirty-eight years, five months, and three days after our first date she still wants to be my best friend? That’s a lot of proverbial water under the bridge! It would be less than honest to say that we’ve never had our moments over the years, but to date none of them have been insurmountable (I like to think of myself as the great compromiser but Mary knows the truth). My need to be popular, influential, famous goes back about as far as I can remember, and what most amazed me about Mary is that she didn’t/doesn’t care that I’m none of those. While I never flat-out lied to her, the early courtship ritual consisted of macho exaggeration (e.g. I was in a “rock band” in high school) which I now know she saw right through but played along anyway. She has faithfully suffered my vocational angst through years of sales, policing, ministering, and now, finally, Camusian bureaucrating (whew! spell check doesn’t like either one of those). Mary has mothered our two beautiful daughters into idyllic adulthood in spite of their father’s bumbling attempts at parenthood, and passed on to Rachel and Rebecca the ability to accept me for who and what I am (which is the luckiest not popular, not influential, not famous guy in the world). I have never taken her precious love for granted, even for a second, because there’s no rationale for it to begin with. All I know is that I love her, she loves me, and I couldn’t ask for anything more even if I was popular, influential, famous…