November 1, 2023
BY MICHELE MILLER
We met in the unlikeliest of places. Or at least my people thought so. A dive bar where everybody knew your name and if they didn’t you might not want to venture in. I did at the behest of a friend who had a crush on someone else, and the rest, they say, is history.
Today the old man and I mark 43 years of “wedded whatever” as I like to call it. By today’s standards that adds up to a whole lot of thick and thin, for better and worse, of holding up and leaning on as we amble along the road of “till death do us part.”
Anniversaries offer times for reflection over time spent – on how we got from here to there. Some of it spent moving at the pace of gleeful gallop. At other times a painful, toilful trod. Most store-bought anniversary cards don’t express this realistic sentiment which is why we gave up on them years ago.
These days it feels like we are coasting some which might have more to do with being on the downhill slide of our boomer years than anything else. We are at that time in our marriage where we can enjoy a comfortable and sometimes preferrable silence in between conversations about aches and pains and regularity along with what birds are alighting on the backyard feeder these days, what the kids and grandkids are up to, when we are going to do the master bathroom over and what our next adventure might be.
Frankly, I’m also at the time of my life when I’m over home improvements.
Seeking adventure along with a passion or hobby is key to feeding yourself and your partner in later life. That’s what I was told some years ago by a gentleman I was writing a story about for the Seniority section of the local rag. He and his wife had recently returned from a biking excursion through France and had been on a handful of “over-50” Road Scholar Trips to some pretty exotic places. He was adamant about the tenet he had adopted for “forever learning” – of keeping the mind as active as the body.
Years later I learned that this brilliant gentleman had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. That gave me even more reason to tap into his advice as I reached my retirement years and add my own spin to it.
We haven’t bicycled our way through France or been on any Road Scholar trips yet, but we have seen some beautiful sights. And while exotic travel is wonderful and certainly exciting, you really don’t have to journey far to find adventure and enrichment. Sometimes there’s so much going on in your own backyard that there’s just not enough time to get to everything.
That’s something I’ve come to understand while undertaking the production of this blog/website that goes a long way to keep me forever learning and experiencing new things, typically with the old man by my side egging me on.
After 43 years we’re still working on it, just coasting along. For now.
Now onward.
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