20th Aniversary

This is an extraordinary week by any measure. On Tuesday night Sweetie and I will be celebrating the twentieth anniversary of our first date and on Thursday, the littlest one will have his second birthday.

What makes them both so extraordinary is the improbability of those events happening at all, much less in the same week. When most of the time life feels like driving with your hands off of the wheel, it’s always a surprise when you keep winding up mostly where you wanted to go in the first place. That inexplicably, all roads do lead to the proverbial Rome and that elusive thing we call happiness is found in the most unlikely of places all along the way.

Twenty years ago I started to fall in love with a beautiful, blond haired, blue-eyed girl that had the lead in the school play. She had the one quality that I couldn’t resist: she laughed at my jokes. Twenty years later she will still laugh and as I’ve gotten older I find that that’s all that matters.

Two years ago this Thursday, our youngest boy was born. He almost didn’t live past forty-eight hours, coming as close to death as you can come without stepping over that edge. Of the first ten months of his life, he spent four of them in the hospital. Some of them as near to death as he was in the first few hours after he arrived.

Though I wouldn’t say those were joyous months, we did laugh a lot. Tragedy and comedy are not as I once thought, on opposite sides of the spectrum. They are as close and connected as conjoined twins. In a lot of ways, laughter is the floatation device that keeps your head above water after the ship sinks.

Tuesday night Sweetie and I are getting a sitter for the boys and are going out for dinner. Saturday we’re having a small party for the youngest with family and a few friends. In a lot of ways it will be a week not unlike any other week, full of the same events and the same people that I feel lucky enough to still be around. But in another way, it will be a week that speaks to the wonders of the universe. That in a world that can move in any direction it wants, at any time it wants, isn’t it amazing that this is where I wound up? Not exactly where I thought I’d be, but in a funny way, right where I belong.

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