20 Years

I’ve never had more trouble writing a single blog post than I’ve had writing this one. In the dozen or so openings I’ve scrapped so far I’ve compared my relationship with my wife to the ebb and flow of the ocean, two symbiotic fish, and, in one particularly dorky attempt, two celestial bodies orbiting one another.

Yes. I tried comparing my marriage to a couple of meteors.

According to Susan, she knew the two of us were going to get married the first time our paths crossed in seventh grade. I, on the other hand, still wasn’t sure we were going to get married while I was in the back room of the church, chugging Jack Daniels out of a three-liter Dr. Pepper bottle and waiting for the preacher to give us the cue that it was time to come out.

Our adventures together started even before that day. By the time we got married we had already driven out west to see the Grand Canyon and Carlsbad Caverns and up north to see Chicago, but the adventures never really stopped. Since we moved in together in 1993, Susan and I have visited 49 of the 50 states (not to mention Canada, Mexico, and the Bahamas). We’ve drug our children along to at least 40 of them. Since that day we’ve lived together in a mobile home, a 110-year-old house in El Reno, an apartment, my father’s spare bedroom (for a month), and in three different houses in Yukon.

And while it’s easy to remember the big adventures — climbing a glacier in Denver, snorkeling off the Florida Keys, whale watching in Alaska — what I enjoy as much if not more are the little adventures. For every redwood we’ve seen in California there’s been a beer shared on our back patio, watching sunsets. I love the vacations and trips and the big stuff, but the little stuff — discovering restaurants and shopping at thrift stores and driving around randomly in search of little adventures — are every bit as much fun.

Twenty years of fun, in fact. Here’s to those and another twenty, and another twenty after that.

Happy 20th anniversary, fellow adventurer.