For Today, For a Lifetime

“And you may ask yourself, well, how did I get here?”

– Talking Heads

I’ve never been married for 22 years before.

It’s a little strange for both me and Heather, like we just came into possession of a DMC DeLorean with the Doc Brown option package. Last week, it was 1998 with my hair refusing to lie flat while we said “I do.” Yesterday, it was 2011, when we moved in with Missy for the first time and became parents in a way that neither of us had ever expected.

Now it’s 2020. And even against the backdrop of The Strangest Year of All™, this still makes us pause.

How DID we get here, anyway?

Silly question, of course. I mean, this is what we promised to do, right? To keep being there even when everything else changes. Like jobs. And homes. And new family members arriving while old ones (or not-so-old ones) leave. And all the rest of it.

But somehow, when you add it all up, it becomes stunning.

Think about it: Who thought we’d last long enough for the 1980s to become cool again?

 

“I did it one piece at a time.”

-Johnny Cash

It’s not unique to us, of course. It’s not even unique to marriage. As a species, we love to make promises that take moments to say and so  much longer to live.

“What do you want to be when you grow up?”

“Where do you see yourself in five years?”

“…and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity …”

Personal commitments. National commitments. All of them so much more than we can see. Our words can leap years, decades, even centuries, but we still have to put them together day by day like everyone else.

And that’s hard.

It’s hard for a young couple who puts time and energy into a fantastic wedding and then discovers that a lasting marriage is a different animal, one that has to be reinvented every day.

It’s hard for a young nation that has to reach those blessings of posterity in fits and starts: sometimes surging forward in triumph, sometimes falling back in despair and most often moving one painful compromise at a time.

It’s hard now, when so much seems to have changed so quickly, to realize that our solutions may not be as quick. That they can’t be.

We can plan. We can prepare. And we should. But all we can reach, right here and now, is today. We’re getting through it as best as we can with what we’ve got.

But if we get through it enough times, it builds into something more.

If we keep going, we can make a difference. To ourselves. To each other. Maybe even to the world.

It all starts with one day.

 

“Look at where we are. Look at where we started.”

-Lin-Manuel Miranda

Heather and I have had a lot of “one days.” Twenty-two years’ worth.

On our very first anniversary, we struggled up the ridge of the Great Sand Dunes. It’s not something either of us would have thought to do on our own, maybe not even something we could have. But together, encouraging each other, we made it step by step.

In a way, we never stopped climbing that ridge. Through chronic illness. Through Missy’s dances and softball games. Through celebration and reflection and more books than any one family should reasonably own.

And love. Love most of all.

Maybe that’s why, when we look back, the surrounding landscape feels so staggering. There’s a lot of journey ahead. But we’ve come so far.

Here’s to all our journeys, wherever we may be on the path. May we all find what we need to take the next step.

We have a day ahead. Let’s make the most of it.

Heather and I certainly plan to.

Half the Fun

They’d taken Heather’s temperature. Too high. Again.

Time to wait. Again.

For half a moment, I could feel the old station wagon forming up around us.

Longtime readers of this column may remember that my wife Heather was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis about two years ago. At the time, we were more relieved than anxious, since it explained so much that had been going on – the periods of foggy memory, the occasional bouts of weakness, and so on. Better to have an enemy you know, right?

Since her MS is of the “relapse-remission” sort, we even managed to get some stretches where things were just about normal again. Well, as normal as you can get when a person also has Crohn’s disease and ankylosing spondylitis (quite a mouthful, huh), but you know what I mean. During that normal time, she and her doctor started planning ahead. A periodic infusion of a “biological” medicine might help her keep on top of things – basically, trading an occasional and very boring five to seven hours in a chair for the ability to keep the MS on a leash.

No problem. Boring medicine days are why God put the Lumberjack Olympics on TV, right?

But something always seemed to keep that medicine just ahead of us, like a will o’ the wisp in a swamp. Things like paperwork that didn’t make it through the mail, or blood tests that had to be rescheduled again and again because another chronic illness had flared up that day and left Heather unable to come out.

Finally, the preliminaries were over. Medicine Day had come.

Unfortunately, so had the Creeping Crud. You know this one. Maybe you’ve even had it, the one that keeps circling back around for another pass? It bumped up Heather’s temperature, just a bit.

Just enough to postpone the infusion. Twice.

It’s a good thing I already have a bald spot. Less hair to tear out in frustration.

That’s when my mind’s eye began to see the Volvo arrive.

When I was a kid, my parents liked to plan long vacations for all of us. This included, more than once, the Great Overland Trek from Colorado to California, with two adults and three children in the confines of one car for multiple hours.

Mom was an expert at distracting us. Dad planned out small jobs that each of us could do. But inevitably, at some point along the highway, the Official Kids’ Chorus of Summer Vacations would arise.

“Are we there yet?”

“Are we there yet?”

“Are we there yet?”

The answer was obvious, of course. Not yet. Not for a long time. (Maybe not for a very long time, if the chorus started while we were still in Wyoming.) But when the good stuff is still ahead and doesn’t seem to be getting any closer, what else can you do?

Some things don’t change very much in three and a half decades.

We still wind up on long journeys, where we’re not at the wheel. We still find ourselves watching the landscape crawl by. And again and again, it seems like each passing hour brings … another passing hour.

It can be maddening. Or at least wearying. Especially if the resolution refuses to come into sight.

All we can do is trust. That California is out there somewhere. That the road does reach a destination. It’s not easy. But it’s necessary. We just have hang on to each other, do what we can on the journey, and keep traveling.

In our case, at least I know we’ll get there. The infusion will, eventually, happen. The treatment will, eventually, begin. And then we can start on a whole new road.

I hope we packed enough snacks.