40: One year ago, exactly one week shy of our 39th anniversary, Miss Julie & I attended a wedding in the same gorgeous cathedral where we stated our vows. As I sat with my sons & daughters-in-law behind me & accompanied by a massive pipe organ played by the same organist in October 1986, I cynically thought of marriage as two people liking each other & agreeing on a permanent sleepover & wondering where to eat until one stops breathing.
     
On the way to the reception, in the same room where me & Miss Julie made our first entrance as a couple, someone asked my better half why there were pews on the sides of the church. Given my background in building & association with Episcopalians, I knew the church was laid out like a cross & the pews were in a section called transcepts, in layman’s terms, arms of the cross.
   
Stepping into the reception, self indulgently pleased with my knowledge, the reality of marriage, its real meaning sank in. Like the cross, the message is sacrifice.
     
It is the sacrifices of quiet dinners because both give, doing what God put them here to do & rarely are the events of they’re put here to scheduled at the same time. Sometimes dinners are quiet because both are exhausted mentally & physically, & sometimes there is a quiet desperation in silent midnight conversations when there is more month than there is money.
     
It’s being in the room with each other when a father dies or taking care of the other’s mom to give a few moments of relief. It’s uttering words as powerful as “I love you”, the words “I’m with you”.
    
It’s chasing an ambulance with a wife & child inside. Five weeks ago, an ambulance held a husband & the wife did the chasing, wondering if a stroke was making the last call on the permanent sleepover. It’s failing but not failing enough, rebounding so that a family spends a Sunday at the hospital.

It’s understanding that intimacy isn’t between the sheets but between blank stares & held hands as a child is loaded into an ambulance, breaks an arm, gets stitches, gets married or becomes a father. It’s tears from choosing the fork in the road between thrown in the towel’s requiem & throw down the gauntlet’s renaissance in hotel room 131 after fire shoots through a roof, or tears worshiping God with grandchildren on the same row or tears from figuring out what to do next when a job is lost with the words “…here’s a months pay, you’re a nice guy, you’re just not our guy.”

It’s about more quiet dinners because the stubborn pride of two people occasionally outran their passion. It’s about fine dining with cloth napkins & multiple forks due to a corner office job & it’s about a Valentine’s Day meal of frozen pizza because lights & water needed to be paid for.
     
When all the columns are totaled, it’s 40 years & two people in a permanent sleepover showing up & never giving up while trying to decide where to eat…