(38TH ANNIVERSARY) THOUGHTS FROM THE DEEP END WITH MISS JULIE’S POOL BOY: 38 years ago today, the Pool Boy clicked “I agree” on the non-negotiable, yearly renewable terms & conditions on his marriage app with Miss Julie. Terms & conditions that resulted in some wounds & scabs & scars, scars that were road maps to places they never wanted to visit again & to beautiful destinations. This past March, they celebrated as their tribe of 2 cubed itself into 8. On the way from 2 to 8, were 38 short years of wedded bliss comprising 13,880 days of varying lengths. On this grand adventure of rips & tears & healing, Miss Julie displayed the 3 H’s. She held the Pool Boy through the darkest of nights, some nights lit by bridges he burned. She harbored him in storms but never let him stay tied to the dock, ships weren’t meant to sit but to sail. She harvested him in the few times of plenty & plenty of times in the few. They cried when they felt the baby move, in a moving van, & when the ground moved beneath their feet. They laughed with the joy of children & grandchildren, laughed at & with each other, & laughed to keep from crying. The summer the first baby arrived, a job was lost & a house was bought. Somehow, every Friday, in a mix of folding money & coins they found the $3 including tax, required for two medium ice cream treats at the local drive in. They spent anniversaries & Valentines Day at places like The Biltmore for a weekend & a table at the Ain’t Got Much for the 18-21 minutes it took for a frozen pizza to insure the lights & water kept working. They didn’t always believe in the others crusade but always believed in each other. MJPB is her champion knight in dented armor though she was never the damsel in distress type. Their faith, a two layer cake of Baptist & Presbyterian iced by the Episcopals, worked for them. It provided purpose for the pain, roses for the thorns, it worked because an itinerant, Middle Eastern carpenter & circuit preacher wore Friday’s thorns, rose & vacated Sunday’s tomb, providing more scars for more road maps. A faith that sharpened each other’s iron when their financial status or social status became a communicable disease & suddenly didn’t meet the criteria for weekend dinners or golf games, friendships falling under the same label of a cyclist quitting the Tour de France,  abandoned. A faith that saw 2 boys grow into solid, strapping young men & find their lives shotgun rider. A faith that in its infancy, saw that God knows what He’s doing, when He answered the Pool Boy’s prayer at romance’s poker table of something beyond a summer fling & Pi Beta Phi’s prettiest, Miss Julie, walked into room 207 of Maclellan Gymnasium & MJPB phased out of his gym rat era as he was dealt a royal flush. A faith that through the crying & trying & surviving in hope of thriving, through the holding & harboring & harvesting, through wounding, scabbing, & scarring has revealed the greatest gift two people could find on earth’s quick journey from crib to obituary…a love for the rainy days & the sunshiney ones, all 13,880 of ’em. Happy 38th Miss Julie!! I’m honored to be your Pool Boy 😍

No more living in darkness
Now that love lights my way
I don’t need any new changes
To make me live today
Who could bring me Heaven
When Heaven’s already here
from “Heaven’s Already Here”
~~Collective Soul~~