Happy Anniversary, dear!

Yesterday for lunch, Peggy wanted Chicken Noodle soup.  She will only eat Campbell's Chicken Noodle soup.  She takes all the pieces of chicken out.  I can't blame her; the chicken in that soup always reminds me (in appearance and in taste) of Chiclets without the candy coating.

Peggy removes every one of them, saying, "I don't like the chicken."

I once got a can of Giant ® brand "Lotsa Noodles" soup, which promised the taste of chicken broth and noodle soup, without the bother of removing all the minute pieces of chicken.  Halfway through it, Peggy told me it was not good, that she missed taking the chicken pieces out.

I have been with her so long that it doesn't even matter anymore that she reminds me of the old burlesque joke where the guy puts 12 spoonsful of sugar in his coffee and then commences to sip at it.  His friend says, "Hey, you didn't stir your coffee!" and the top banana says, "Who can stand it so sweet?"

On the other hand, when she saw me walking into my shower stall with a bottle of white vinegar, a plastic bag and a plastic wire-tie, she knew there was a logical explanation,  and that it did not involve some novel method of self-gratification.  I read that if you tie a bag o'vinegar around your shower head, it will remove all the gunky deposits and allow the shower to shoot more water.  So I gave it a good overnight soakification and enjoyed a veritable Niagara of steamy sudsy shower satisfaction the next day.

These are things that we have learned about each other in 39 years of happy matrimony.  Beyond her preference in soup (above), music (Enya and Sarah McLachlan) and TV shows (Raymond, Mindy and Oprah get thumbs up, Car 54 and Phil Silvers thumbs down), I can't predict much about her, except for one thing.

And that one thing is that as sure as the sun will rise in the morning, as sure as it's going to rain some days and not others, and as sure as God made little green apples, Peggy, for whatever reasons, loves me in the most perfect, loyal, and devoted way that a person can love another. 

Even when I'm wrong, she acts like it's all right.  Even when I'm being a horse's patootie, she acts like a horse's patootie is just what she wanted.  I can't even begin to talk about how much I love my Peggy and how much we enjoy each other's company, so I won't even start enumerating the ways.

Before I started artificially graying my hair

Other people wonder about our story and how we fell in love on a Thursday and got engaged the following Monday and then got married in just five months.  I marvel at it as well.  As far as I'm concerned, I would have been happy to get married the night we met, but there was no church open, so I waited.

39 years later, on our way to together forever, as Paul Harvey used to say, and not one petal has fallen off the bloom of our love.  You don't have to tell me how lucky I am to have her.  I know it every time I look in her eyes, which are still the exact color of root-beer barrel candy.

Thank you, Peggy, for all these years of love, encouragement, support and fun and laughter.  I don't know what I ever did to deserve all this happiness, but I'm glad to have it.  And thanks to friends and kinfolk for being there, too.  No one would believe this story if not for you being witnesses to it all!