Jennie and I had always had a plan, ever since the days before we were married, that we were going to have two kids. When we were discussing these things during our courtship, they were whimsical discussions on the distant future. But, as recurring discussion so often do, they took on an importance of their own –a weight of their own– every time we had the discussion again. After a certain point, it was understood that we were going to do what we said we were going to do, just because those plans had, at some juncture, actually become plans.

Our son’s birth, in 2004, set us on the path down the road of our plans.

But, when Jennie called me while I was at work in the late fall of 2006, from a OB/GYN appointment, to tell me that we were having twins, the plan of two kids was out the window.

Three has been fifty percent better, anyway.

* * *

That pregnancy, however, was problematic throughout. Jennie had complications all along the way, and those complications culminated in a doctor’s visit on March 7th of 2007, when Jennie was told that she wasn’t going to be leaving the hospital until after the twins were born. As it turned out, Jennie’s water had broken and it wasn’t going to be safe for the babies, as young as they were at that point, to be any distance from the hospital, in the event that anything might happen. Jennie was ordered to bed rest in the hospital later that same day.

For the both of us, this development came as a shock, and while we were scared, we tried to take it in stride. I carried on with the business of being a parent for our two-and-a-half year old while Jennie was stranded in the hospital. We visited Jennie, Garrett and I, in the hospital each evening, and then I would take my son home for bedtime, and for daycare the next day, while I continued to work. I know that he really didn’t have much of an understanding of why it was that things had changed; it’s hard to explain complicated things to toddlers in ways that they can understand.

I am glad that we didn’t end up having to do that for very long. Eight days later, the twins were born. Three months early.

In case you are wondering how early a baby can be born before it is too early for it to survive, in 2007, the edge was right around twenty-eight weeks of gestation.

Or about three months early.

So, needless to say, things were difficult.

* * *

On the evening of March 15th –if you’ve ever read Julius Caesar by Shakespeare, that date should ring a bell– I’d just put my son to bed and was in the process of making my way through the episode of Lost that was waiting for me on the DVR, when the phone rang. I was irritated for having to pause my show to answer the phone, and I was irritated at the fact that the phone my wake my newly sleeping son, so I jumped up quickly and answered it gruffly.

Meanwhile, as I was doing these things, Jennie was being convinced by an intern resident at the hospital that she was not, in fact, having labor pains, and that rather, she was needing to have a bowel movement. As a result, and to the shock of the intern resident, our first daughter was born in the bathroom of my wife’s hospital room. I’ll spare you the gravest of details on the matter.

The phone call I received was the hospital, telling me that my wife had just given birth to our first daughter and if I didn’t get to the hospital in a hurry, I was going to miss the second birth, as well.

My parents, at the time, lived about a twelve minute drive away from us. I called my mom and told her that I couldn’t leave for the hospital until she was at my house to stay with my son, So, six minutes later, she pulled into my driveway, at slightly less than the speed of sound, and I left for the hospital.

The hospital was about a twenty minute drive from our home. It had quite the series of stoplights, and that night, I caught every single red light on the way to the hospital. If you’ve ever been out on a road after dark, racing from red light to red light, you may have attracted what I attracted that night.

Competition.

About halfway through the trip to the hospital, I was waiting at a red light when a sports car pulled up next to me and revved its engine, the driver turning to stare me down. Keep in mind, of course, that I am sitting in the mini-van that we’d just recently purchased, to accommodate the family growing from three members to five. The fact that this idiot was wanting to drag race with me, when I was just trying to get to the hospital, was absurd.

What was even more absurd was how badly I smoked him when that light finally turned green.

When I finally got to the hospital, I stormed to the location where I expected to find my wife, and the hospital staff stopped me to tell me that she’d just gone in to emergency surgery and I was not allowed into the surgery area. So, for about ten minutes or so, I paced back and forth, like a lost puppy, outside of the doors to the surgery area, wanting to be somewhere that I couldn’t go, wanting to see someone that I couldn’t see, and not quite sure of what to do next.

Then, a nurse from the neonatal intensive care unit found me and told me that I could either wait to be let in to see my wife, or I could come with her and see my first-born daughter.

As I met, for the first time, my middle child, my youngest was being delivered via C-section because she was in the breech position. She ended up being brought to the NICU a short time later, while my wife was escorted to post-op.

* * *

Looking at my two beautiful daughters –Lilly and Sarah– these days, and remembering how tenuous their first moments in the world were, all those years ago, I can’t help but think about the story –the miracle– of their birth and their survival. When one of them frustrates me or disappoints me, I don’t have to think very long about how desperately we prayed and hoped for them to continue to cling to life, before I’ve forgotten their trespasses. Their story is a story worth telling.

My wife, Jennie, turned twenty-one on March 31st, 1999. It was also the night that I asked her to marry me. Combining the two into something big was a challenge.

Of course, the twenty-first birthday in America is one of the most anticipated ones, since it’s the final birthday for which something becomes permitted, that was previously denied, because of someone being “underage”. While Jennie’s never been much of a drinker, she was looking forward to that birthday, and spending it with her college roommates and friends, as much as any other twenty year old.

So, imagine her disgust with the idea that I wanted to take her back home, away from her college friends, for her twenty-first birthday. Let’s just that, when I first floated the idea to her, she wasn’t particularly fond of the notion.

To get her to agree with the concept, I told her that I’d gotten reservations at one of the most prestigious restaurants back home, through a friend who knew someone with the proper connections. Jennie agreed to the idea, primarily because I promised that it was going to be a night to remember.

Boy, was it.

At this point, I was a newly minted alumnus from the University of Notre Dame, with some still pretty significant ties to the Notre Dame Glee Club where I’d sang as a club member for four years. I reached out to some of my closest friends who were still in the club, to assist me in proposing to my girlfriend. I told them to meet me at Applebee’s.

Now, as everyone knows, Applebee’s is not an exclusive restaurant. But, it was our favorite restaurant, Jennie and I, and it seemed like the perfect place to make all of this happen. I coordinated with the manager of the Applebee’s that we frequented back home to get things set up for that evening. More on that in a minute.

I got Jennie to agree to this whole thing on a stipulation that we would leave campus, come home to have dinner, and be back to campus as soon as possible. So, we left campus, drove home, and stopped at my parents’ house for a moment or two while I confirmed our reservations for dinner.

But of course, there weren’t any reservations.

When I got done using the phone, I hung it up and turned to tell Jennie, while wearing my best fake disappointed look, that there was a mix-up at the restaurant and that we weren’t going to be having dinner at the fancy and exclusive destination for which we’d left our college campus and traveled many miles to come home to visit.

You could see the dismay on Jennie’s face.

So, I scrambled to try to come up with a Plan B (wink, wink). I suggested that we should go to our favorite Applebee’s to try to make the best of things. It wasn’t what Jennie had in mind, and it was a very distant second choice for a girl who didn’t have any idea what was coming next.

So, we left my parents’ house and we headed off to dinner. Meanwhile, Jennie’s family was already on their way to the same restaurant.

During the trip to dinner, Jennie was despondent. She complained that she wasn’t going to get to be with her friends on her twenty-first birthday because I’d dragged her away from campus. She complained about the reservations that had fallen through and that she wasn’t even going to have that to enjoy. She couldn’t be consoled.

I, meanwhile, had a hard time keeping a straight face. I knew what was coming. I was, after all, driving a car with a dozen red roses and an engagement ring in the trunk.

The Applebee’s, when we arrived, seated us immediately at a corner table, and we ordered our meals and drinks –Jennie legally ordered her first drink in a restaurant and enjoyed getting to do that, at least. It was at that point that I remembered that I’d forgotten my wallet in my car.

Which, of course, I hadn’t.

But, it gave me the opportunity to run back out to my car, which I’d parked far enough away to be unnoticed, and pop the trunk, so that the several members of the Notre Dame Glee Club would be able to get inside to get the roses and the ring. Those members of the glee club, two first tenors, two second tenors, two baritones, and two basses
–an octet– got the roses and the ring and congregated in the kitchen with the restaurant manager to organize the reveal.

Then, I made my way back inside –wallet in tow– to be with Jennie while the plan unfolded.

She didn’t immediately understand why our food was delivered to the table by men in tuxedos. She didn’t immediately understand why one of them handed her a dozen red roses. But, when they arranged themselves around the table and began singing Let Me Call You Sweetheart in barbershop harmony, and I got down on my knee next to her seat, with the box that they’d given me, to show her the engagement ring, things became pretty clear.

And Jennie’s family, who’d been seated on the other side of the restaurant during the whole thing, came over to take pictures and bear witness to the event.

The glee club octet was so loud that I didn’t hear Jennie answer the question that I’d asked, so I repeated the question to her a second time. She confirmed, more loudly, her reply, and we listened to them finish the song. It was all so exciting that neither of us even finished the food that we’d ordered. Jennie didn’t even finish her drink. The glee club guys congratulated us and went on their way. The other people in the restaurant at the time were also warm and approving.

And then, we headed back to our college campus, arriving late in the evening, to Jennie’s friends and roommates who were excited about what had taken place and excited about Jennie’s birthday.

The whole story even ended up getting published in the newspaper when Jennie submitted it to the Wedding Announcements section of the paper. That was pretty cool, too.

I don’t know if I have ever done a worse job of meeting Jennie’s expectations for any of her birthdays, or if I have ever exceeded her expectations to a greater extent.

I’ve had problems in the past with my temper, but through some anger management practices that I’ve incorporated into my life, I’ve been able to control my temper issues much better in recent years.

This post has nothing to do with any of that.

Rather, it has to do with gasoline.

My wife and I bought our first house about eighteen months after we got married, having lived in an apartment during that first year-and-a-half, saving money for the eventual starter home.

It was small and it was never going to be forever, but it worked well for about seven years. It had a lot of things going for it as a starter home, but the clock was ticking all along, and we were going to end up leaving that place. Nevertheless, we made improvements to the place, here and there. We made one of the bedrooms into a nursery where all three of our children spent some of their youngest nights. We planted a side garden one spring that yielded more zucchinis than you would have imagined could come from so few plants.

One of the issues that we tried to address with the house, an issue that we tried to fix but never completely tackled, was a significant stump in the middle of the backyard. One time, we gingerly wiggled my pickup truck in between the side of our garage and our neighbor’s nearby fence so we could get the pickup into the backyard, where I proceeded to hook the truck up to the stump with a tow cable. The truck tires dug some pretty impressive trenches in the dirt of the backyard, while the stump held the truck solidly in place.

And then, there was the time that I thought that the best way to deal with the stump was to go at it with an axe. Not at any particularly decent level of upper-body fitness at the time, my physical strength gave out long before the stump took very much damage at all. As a matter of fact, if I remember correctly, the axe head ended up coming loose from my axe handle at one point; I don’t know if you’ve ever seen how far an axe head can fly when it leaves the handle to which it was once attached, but those suckers can go quite the distance.

And then, there was the last battle with the stump. Which isn’t to say that we beat the stump. Rather, we quit the battlefield.

I’d read something on the internet somewhere that said that you could soak a stump in gasoline (remember, back at the start of this post, when I said it was about gasoline) and that doing so would cause it to slowly burn the stump out when you set fire to it.

Now, before you start to SMH, understand that I am not what you would call a dumb person –> I am in the top thirteen percent of educated people in the United States, according to recent information from the Census Bureau. However, I never registered for the class in college on starting fires with gasoline.

So, I soaked the stump with gasoline. I put a decent amount on there, and I let it soak for hours –> it may have even been overnight. And then, very cautiously, I approached the gasoline-soaked stump with a lighter, and I lit the stump, and…

…nothing.

Well, not exactly nothing.

It burned. The gasoline, not the stump.

Several minutes later, all I had was a stump that appeared unscathed by having been on fire for several minutes. And the smell of burnt gasoline tinging the air. And the smell of my defeat, also tinging the air.

So, I went and got some more gasoline. As smart as I am, of course I didn’t have the gasoline anywhere near the stump as it was burning; I mean, what kind of a fool do you take me for?

And, of course, because I am significantly intelligent, I put the gasoline in an open container, because only an idiot would put it in a closed container, thereby making an explosion much more likely.

So, with my one-gallon ice cream bucket filled about half way with gasoline, I approached the stump once again.

As many times as I’ve looked back on that moment, leading up to what happens next, I can’t remember having thought to myself at all about the fact that the stump was just recently on fire and that the stump might still be hot enough to cause the gasoline to catch fire upon contact. That thought never entered my mind, at least not as far as I can remember.

Of course, the stump was hot enough still to catch the gasoline on fire on contact, so when I poured the gasoline on the stump, the gas caught fire. Then, the fire climbed the stream of pouring gasoline, back up and into the bucket, to the extent that I was, two seconds later, holding a ice cream bucket with burning gas in it.

This caused a total freak-out.

I threw the ice cream bucket, with burning gasoline in it, up in the air, in a panic, and burning gasoline left the bucket, mid-air, and rained down on my head.

In retrospect, it probably would have been more intelligent to just calmly set the bucket down and step away, but that’s not what I did.

Did you know, by the way, that the old trick that they taught all of us when we were in elementary school –stop, drop, and roll– doesn’t work in the slightest if what is burning is a liquid on your very skin? You can roll around till the cows come home and it’s not going to put out the burning liquid on your skin.

It’s about here in the story where I should bring in the hero, the person who saves the day.

While I was doing all of these ridiculous things in the backyard, my wife was mowing the lawn in the same general vicinity. She ended up seeing me and putting out the fire on me with the nearby garden hose. Even after the fire was out, I told her to keep spraying me because the gasoline on my skin felt so hot that I was concerned that I would start burning again.

After my wife was done with the garden hose, I ended up taking a cold shower to wash gasoline off of me (and because I had been rolling around on the ground, trying to put myself out). After the shower, it became pretty clear that the skin on the side of my head and on one of my ears was very badly burnt. I almost ended up having to have my ear reconstructed.

So, if you are looking for some lessons to take away from this story, here’s a couple:

**No matter how intelligent you believe yourself to be, there are things that you don’t know anything about; it’s dangerous to pretend that you do.

**Any husband who is preparing to do something stupid would be best served in having his wife nearby to “catch him when he falls”.

**Don’t believe everything that you read on the internet.

**The one sure way to make a bad situation worse is by panicking.

When we sold the house in the summer of 2009, that stump was still there. I wonder if it still is.

Our hometown has hosted an event called “Thrill on the Hill” for several years now. The event takes place on one of the most significant hills in town, which also just so happens to be one of the town’s busiest streets. Usually, a couple of days before the weekend-long event begins, traffic on that road is rerouted and the road is closed, for preparations. When the event first started, it was a winter event, so the hill became a snow-covered tubing hill for a few days.

Years later, due to the popularity of the winter event, a summer event developed. This event was a street-sized waterslide, with a wading pool/water play area at the bottom of the hill.

From where my family lives in our town, these events occur about a third of a mile away, so they have a draw simply because they are happening so near-by.

The winter event is less reliable, since you can never really tell, in January or February in our area, whether it’s going to be snowy and in the teens, or clear skies in the mid-thirties. In the nine or ten years (I’m guessing) that the event has been happening, they’ve probably cancelled the winter version of it as many times as it has occurred.

The summer version of the Thrill on the Hill happened for the first time in 2016, but we were out of town on vacation at the time. The second annual summer Thrill on the Hill happened in 2017. While we weren’t on vacation at the time, we were involved –my wife and I– in building a wall.

Our family lives in a home that we moved into in the late summer of 2009. Between 2009 and 2017, my wife and I had been arguing, on and off, from time to time, about what we were going to do about the retaining wall that needed to be built in our front yard. I wanted to build a wall out of cinder block, because it would match the retaining wall that our neighbor hand in her front yard and the retaining wall that her neighbor had next to her.

My wife, on the other hand, wanted to do something different. We argued about building materials and plans for almost eight years. Then, in 2017, we decided that it was time to stop the arguing about the wall and time to start moving forward in making progress.

On August 5th, 2017, the Saturday of the summer Thrill on the Hill weekend, I’d rented a jackhammer from a local tool rental shop, and I was working on destroying the buried retaining wall that we were going to have to remove in order to be able to build a new wall with nothing in the way. While I was working on the jackhammer, my wife and three kids went to the Thrill on the Hill, mostly to stay out of my way.

They were doing their thing, and I was doing mine. And a few hours passed.

Until, while I was working on the jackhammer, a golf cart pulled up in front of my house with my wife and twin daughters on the back bench and my son, sitting pale and in shock, next to a local firefighter, driving the golf cart.

Before I was able to put any of what I was seeing together into a coherent understanding of what was going on, my wife said to me, “You need to bring the car around because Garrett needs to go to the hospital.” I looked at the firefighter, who is also my trusted mechanic and a personal friend, and I could see the look in his face that said that things were serious and I needed to do what I was being told.

My son had fallen in the wet slipperiness of the Thrill on the Hill and broken his arm.

Our garage, which is behind our house (we live on a corner lot) on an alleyway, never seemed so far away. I got my car out and brought it around to where my family was, in front of the house. We loaded my son into the car and took him to the hospital emergency room. To keep his mind off of the pain he was experiencing during the drive, we quizzed him on basic math facts.

We got to the emergency room and got our son checked in. He was given the pain medication that he needed to have, while x-rays were taken and then the break was “reset” and wrapped so his swelling could go down.

We ended up setting him up afterward with an orthopedic specialist, to continue to handle his case moving forward. He ended up having a “closed reduction”, done by the orthopedic specialist and held in place with a few pins and a cast.

The situation was a little more complicated because he broke his right arm. It was even more complicated because he was going to be an eighth grader that fall and had received a draft pick into the high school band. And a right handed trumpet player, with a broken right arm, has a significant mountain to climb, for sure. Garrett ended up playing his trumpet that fall by holding it up with his left arm and activating the valves with the fingers sticking out of the end of his cast.

If you’ve ever had to use your left arm for something that you’re used to using your right arm for, you’ll quickly discover the difference in the strength levels of the two arms, quite often.

Needless to say, we’ve not been back to the summer version of the Thrill on the Hill.

Sixteen years ago, at this very moment (as I’m writing this, not as you’re reading it), my wife and I had arrived home after grocery shopping in the afternoon of Sunday, June 27th, 2004. That shopping trip, which would have happened sixteen years ago, earlier this afternoon, was a miserable trip for Jennie, because she was terribly uncomfortable and very pregnant with our first born child.

There was one point, during the shopping, when she sat down on an end cap shelf at the end of one of the aisles, and allowed herself a few moments of rest and relative comfort. She’d been complaining of back aches all afternoon (which were, of course, not back aches but the start of contractions, for a girl who didn’t know what contractions actually felt like), and the shopping trip ended up being too much for her, at that point.

If someone would have come up to us to say something to my wife about sitting on the end cap shelf, I would have 1) defended my wife’s decision with a bold tongue lashing, and 2) warned that person to get as far away from my wife as possible, because she would not have treated such an assailant in an appropriate manner.

Little did we know at that point that she was only twelve hours away from the start of full-on labor pains.

We put the groceries away when we got home. We would have had dinner. Basically, we did the normal things, that evening, that a young married couple would have done. We probably watched some television; in 2004, if I remember correctly (with the help of the television listings that I looked up from that year on the internet), we were watching Big Brother –because my brother and sister-in-law had gotten us interested– or we may have watched the NASCAR race that night, because we were into NASCAR back then.

Early in the morning, the next morning –the 28th of June– at about two in the morning, my wife rolled over and woke me up out of a dead sleep to ask me to give her a back rub. I rubbed her lower back for as long as I could and she fell back to sleep. Then, she woke me up thirty minutes later to ask for the same thing, which I did. Then, twenty five minutes after that –> the same thing.

It was at that point that it occurred to me that 1) she was in labor, and 2) the contractions were getting closer together. So, we got ourselves up and we called the hospital for advice. And they said, “You need to come to the hospital, right away, because she’s in labor.”

And so, we grabbed the bag that we’d packed in advance, to be ready for that point in time, and we headed to the hospital. I was, at the time, driving a Chevy Silverado truck, and Jennie, on the way to the hospital, made her way through the contractions by grabbing the handle mounted inside the cab near the door frame, used normally for pulling one’s self into the truck.

So, at this point, it is about four in the morning and we are arriving at the hospital. Do you know what the proper etiquette is for dropping your wife off at the delivery room, because I sure didn’t. Was I supposed to leave her at the door and go find a parking space, or was I supposed to make her walk with me from the parking space to the entry of the labor and delivery wing of the hospital? I didn’t know –and I can’t remember what we ended up doing– but I do remember being very stressed out about it. Also, it’s pretty easy to find a parking space at the hospital at four in the morning.

Of course, I grabbed the Hi-8 video camera that we had back then (digital video was still catching on at that point), so I could record the whole thing –there’s a video that we’ve never watched– and I set up the recording as soon as we got to the hospital (all in good taste, of course).

As it turned out, Jennie went through the whole delivery without an epidural, since we’d arrived at the hospital too far into the labor process to get one. And I stood by her side through the whole thing, and she grabbed my hand during the contractions and squeezed with the force of a vise.

If I remember correctly, we were a little worried about the fact that our doctor wasn’t at the hospital when we got there, and we got even more worried when he didn’t show up immediately thereafter. In my recollection, he showed up at the point in time when it was necessary for him to be there, and not a moment earlier.

Our son was born at about 7:30 in the morning. Of course, it’s hard to keep straight whether or not that was 7:30 Indiana time or 7:30 Michigan time, since back then, the two parts of Michiana operated in different time zones. That’s a different story, entirely.

Jennie had, at that point, been working for Notre Dame for a few years, and she used to leave for work, from our house in Michigan, at 8:30 in the morning, in order to get to work at 8:00. Try wrapping your head around that one. And, because all three of our children were born in Indiana, while we lived in Michigan, their birth certificates all have the State of Indiana listed as their birthplace.

Anyway…

Jennie was such a trooper, throughout the whole thing; I’ll never forget that she said, not long after the delivery, that she thought she could get cleaned up and head into work (for this was a Monday morning, at that point). Of course, it blew my mind that she would say such a thing right after what had happened, but she’s always been a very strong woman.

All of the family had the opportunity to come in, taking turns, to see the newest addition to the family. Jennie’s parents had been vacationing in the very northern part of the lower peninsula of Michigan when we headed into the hospital, and they made their way to the hospital from there –violating speed limits up and down the west coast of Michigan on their way– to make it to the hospital to see Garrett. My parents came in to see Garrett, and Garrett’s aunts and uncles came in to see him, as well. They all got the chance to hold him for a few moments, on that early Monday morning.

We stayed in the hospital for a few days, while Jennie recuperated and we tried to get used to the rhythm of having a newborn in our life. We had plenty of visitors during those days, and we got a lot of bouquets of flowers, from Jennie’s office and from my teacher’s union, among others. I got to change Garrett’s first diaper, sixteen years ago tomorrow.

And, as it turns out, I just changed a diaper a couple of days ago, belonging to Garrett’s cousin, who is more than fourteen years younger than he is. That child’s mother was still a single young lady when she held Garrett on the morning of his birth.

What a day!

And so, on June 28th, 2020, I will celebrate the sixteenth birthday of my one and only son. That day, so long ago and yet just hanging there in my memory, was one of the most important days of my life. I thank God for giving me such a wonderful, funny, lovable, precious boy.

My wife and I spent a decent amount of time agonizing over our wedding song. We considered a lot of different options, in the weeks and months before the big day, and we narrowed down the search to a few, viable choices. Some of the choices were songs that were popular at the time, but had little chance of standing the test of time. Others were classics that we knew we would be able to hear, from time to time, over the decades. Narrowing the list down to the finalists was quite the process. And, while I don’t know whether or not other engaged couples do this same thing, or whether or not they are as painstaking as we were, I can tell you that I am absolutely certain that we made the right choice on the song that we picked.

Our wedding song, the song that we first danced to as a married couple, is Wonderful Tonight, by Eric Clapton.

And, it wasn’t long after that, we made a decision, a promise to each other; we decided that we were going to make it our practice to always dance with each other when that song comes on.

We’ve been married for nineteen years, and during that time, we have heard our wedding song play in our house, and in our cars, and in public places of all sorts, and we have, every time that it’s been practical to do so, danced to that song. Most recently, my wife and I heard the song last weekend, playing on the stereo in our kitchen, and we danced in between the stove and the kitchen sink.

Jennie’s shorter than I am, so our close slow dancing usually involves me leaning over to rest the side of my head against hers, cheek to cheek. This gives me the coveted opportunity to sing the lyrics of the song in her ear. We sway, back and forth, and I hold her close inside my arms. It’s cliched to say that something is magical, but when that song comes on, and we look at each other, and we move into each other’s embrace, it really is a magical moment.

When it happens, EVERY time it happens, it occurs to me that I get an opportunity to tell the rest of the world “NO!”, if only for a few minutes, while I turn to my wife and say “YES!”

* * *

My Junior and Senior Prom, and my wife’s Junior and Senior Prom were in the years 1993, 1994, 1995, and 1996. For four years in a row, we had proms to attend.

In 1993, when I was a junior in high school, my wife and I had yet to formally meet, so my junior prom is rarely discussed. I can say that the dance happened at the Union Station in South Bend, and I wore a baby-blue tuxedo (don’t ask; I don’t want to talk about it).

In 1994, when I was a senior, my wife and I had just started dating a few weeks prior to my Senior Prom. What this unfortunately meant for us, since I’d already asked a female friend of mine to accompany me, was that we did not go together to my Senior Prom. For all of the honor that I claimed to be defending by not trading in my first choice when I had a legitimate reason to do so, my senior prom was miserable and she was a miserable date (I can say that because I think there’s a snowball’s chance in hell that she’s reading this). The dance occurred at the Heritage Center in St. Joe.

In 1995, during my wife’s junior year of high school, she asked me to go with her to her Junior Prom because, even though we weren’t dating at that particular time (for more on that story, head HERE), she considered me the best option for a date. It ended up being the impetus for us to resume our dating relationship. The dance happened at the clubhouse of the Orchard Hills Country Club, in our hometown. It’s the only prom for which I remember the theme: “A Dream Is Like A River”. We still have the votive candle holders that were given out as gifts at the dance. Every time I think about that prom, Garth Brooks is singing in the back of my mind.

In 1996, during my wife’s senior year, I was the presumptive choice to be her date to her Senior Prom. The dance happened at the Morris Performing Arts Center in downtown South Bend, and I will never forget the dress that she wore that evening, partly because she’d made the dress from scratch, and partly because of how amazing she looked in it. That night was also special because Jennie’s father let me take Jennie in his Pontiac convertible –> such a sweet car.

* * *

When Jennie and I first started dating, she was a country girl, which is to say that she’d grown up on a farm, and she listened to country music, and she raised animals to sell at the county fair. It was part of what I thought was so adorable about her, early on.

One of the things that went along with being a country music fan in the 1990s was line dancing.

And, as if I was having to work my way through one of many rites of passage as the boy wanting to be her boyfriend, I was pulled into, on at least a couple of occasions, line dancing in her driveway.

The way that I remember it, we were –she and I– in the presence of several other couples in the driveway of her home. Most of these other couples were relatives or friends of the family, so that Jennie and I were two of the youngest people present. And her dad would set up a stereo so that we could dance to the country hits of the 1990s –> Pickup Man and Watermelon Crawl and Fishin’ in the Dark and Friends in Low Places and Boot Scootin’ Boogy.

If you think regular dancing is rough, country line dancing is worse, especially when you are a gangly teenage boy who barely controlled his own appendages on the best of days. It was all, “put your right foot here and your left foot there while you are moving to the left and then clap your hands in front of you and then clap them behind you and then twirl around and then move back to the left while putting your…” Way too much for me to handle.

In fact, maybe that was the point; maybe the entire experience was an attempt to see how I would handle social embarrassment.

Those were not my most graceful moments, but even back then, we were dancing together.

* * *

Jennie and I have approximately three swing dance lessons under our shared belt.

We thought it would be very cool if we learned how to swing dance for our wedding reception. We were going to wow our attendees with moves that would impress the Brian Setzer Orchestra and the Cherry Poppin’ Daddies.

They say the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

We took our lessons at The BOB in downtown Grand Rapids, and it became clear after only three lessons that neither of us had the coordination to be able to pull of what it was that the teacher was trying to teach us in those classes.

Nevertheless, spending the time with her, trying to do my best to impress her, laughing at what we couldn’t do and trying to accomplish something together –> my best memories of all time have been memories like these with Jennie –> trying and laughing and failing and loving each other anyway.

I guess, in the end, I will always prefer to listen to swing music, as opposed to dancing to it.

I’d like to think that we still wowed our guests at our wedding reception, but for other reasons.

* * *

We’ve had opportunities to dance at wedding receptions and at high school dances and at balls and galas and formals; it would be hard to estimate how many times Jennie and I have danced together. I’m sure the number is probably higher than I would even guess it to be.

Something truly amazing has occurred to me as I’ve thought of all of this dancing.

I’m still excited to dance with my wife. After all of these years, I’ve never gotten tired of it, and I don’t expect that I am ever going to turn down the chance to slow dance with my wife.

Especially if Wonderful Tonight is playing.

My wife and I, the other night, were entertaining some guests, and the group of us got to talking about our romantic pasts. As we shared our stories, some of us told stories of shy and awkward dealings in romance, while others seemed to have taken the experience more “in stride”; some had lucky tales involving relatively few stepping stones between them and true love, while others seemed to have blazed a swath of destruction through the dating world.

During this conversation, I revealed the fact that I’ve never dumped anyone. At no point in my life have I ever been the person responsible for ending the romantic relationship. Even my own wife dumped me, but more on that in a minute.

If you think about the phrase “being dumped”, it is simultaneously A) a phrase that sounds unpleasant enough so that people would avoid wanting to “be dumped”, and B) an accurate description of the experience. Believe me; I should know.

* * *

My wife and I have been married for more than nineteen years. We’ve been together, as a couple for more than twenty-six. Those first seven-plus years, from March of 1994 to May of 2001, we were dating.

Well… almost that whole time.

The last person who ever dumped me was my wife, in the Fall of 1994.

For, you see, my wife and I started dating when I was a senior and she was a sophomore. I was eighteen at the time, and she was sixteen. What that lead up to, as spring turned to summer and summer faded into fall, was a high-school junior dating a college freshman. Now, luckily for me, my first undergraduate degree came from a university just down the street a little bit, so it wasn’t that hard for me to get back home to keep the fires burning, so to speak. But, the fact that my wife was dating a college freshman was a point of contention with her parents.

And, what possible chance would I have had –if I had been made aware of the concern in advance of my then-girlfriend deciding to take action– in trying to convince her that her parents, who’d raised her and cared for her for her entire life, the very people with whom she shared her home, were wrong and our relationship was right?

I would have had no chance. So, looking back, I guess it was fine that it came at me out of a clear blue sky.

I was at my then-girlfriend’s house on what was –no doubt– a weekend evening, and she and I were watching television. It was a movie, converted to television (back in the day, when they used to do that kind of stuff), with the racy parts removed to make space for the proper number of television commercials. The movie was The Pelican Brief, starring Julia Roberts and Denzel Washington. I only remember because, like so many of the other details of that evening, it is burnt onto my brain.

During one of the commercial breaks of the movie, when the network gave several moments to a certain number of advertisers, working on behalf of a certain number of corporations, to try to sell my then-girlfriend and I a certain number of products, we spent the time, instead, breaking up.

I got dumped during a commercial break in a movie-edited-for-television.

As a side note, to this day, I have not seen the ending of the movie; I am afraid of what might come, were I to try.

I got in my Plymouth Horizon (I think it was an ’87), and I drove as far down the road as I could get before my vision, through my tears, got so bad that I had to pull over. As it turns out, that wasn’t very far. I wondered, only after the fact, if the sound of me, beating on the hood of my car in frustration and pain, made it all the way back to my then-girlfriend’s house.

Thus began the long dark winter of my soul… ahem, ahem.

To be completely honest, the months that passed between the time when we broke up, in the fall, and when we got back together in the spring, were lost to me in the fog of my freshman year at a university where twenty percent of the freshmen never made it to sophomore year –or so the story went back then. I was so deep in textbooks and lecture notes, trying to keep my hopes of becoming an engineer alive, it was probably better for the both of us, not to be attached.

In the spring, when my then-girlfriend needed a date to her junior prom, she asked me. We’d been able, over those months, to stay in touch and to remain friends. To hear her tell the story, that time involved –for her– a couple of dates with some other guys who weren’t suitable replacements for me.

For, you see, part of the problem was this: I was my then-girlfriend’s first boyfriend. I’d called her, to ask her to go to the movies with me coincidentally, on the day before her sixteenth birthday, and –unbeknownst to me– she’d been prohibited from dating until she was sixteen. On Wednesday night, March 30th, 1994, I needed a date, because my best friend was busting my chops to go on a double-date with him and his girlfriend. So, despite the fact that she was, at the time, 15.997 years old, her parents gave their permission and we went to see The Mighty Ducks 2, which had premiered the weekend before.

I can’t fault my then-girlfriend’s parents –my current in-laws– for feeling the way that they did, at the time. Now that I have not one, but two teenage daughters (they had three, which is to say that I have two sisters-in-law), I’m not sure how I’d feel about them getting exceedingly exclusive with any particular guy in the near future.

In any case, it all worked out in the end; it was a bump in a road that has otherwise been fairly smooth.

Twenty-six years, give or take about six or seven months, is a great run, so far.

My wife’s grandmother, on her father’s side, died from cancer, more than a decade ago. Her name was Delcie, and I remember her as a positive, charming, warm lady who was always a joy to be around. She was short, and her two daughters –my wife’s two aunts on her father’s side– are both short as well, and also both very pleasant and charming. I still see, whenever I see either of the two of them, Sue and Patti, a lot of Delcie, living on in them.

At the point in time when the cancer was first discovered, it had metastasized and spread all over her body. No surgeon, or team of surgeons, could have removed every piece of the cancer, with a dozen scalpels working constantly for hours. As I remember it, she didn’t put up any fight at all, from a medical standpoint; since things were so far gone, there wasn’t much that could have been done. The exploratory surgery that led to the discovery was the last medical procedure of her life, if memory serves.

Today, she’s most certainly in a better place.

Delcie’s husband, Vern –my wife’s paternal grandfather and my father-in-law’s father– was lost without his wife. I don’t remember how long it was, exactly, that Vern lived after Delcie’s death, but I don’t remember it being very long. To this day, many of the members of the family consider Vern to have died from a broken heart.

Delcie took care of Vern; that became obvious to everyone after her death –if it hadn’t been before– when she wasn’t around and Vern started to require a lot of care and looking after. To the extent that Delcie was so lovable and enjoyable, Vern was a little bit less so, especially in the eyes of his children, to my recollection. So, the tediousness of having to look after Vern was taxing on everyone involved.

Delcie gave piano lessons, back in the day, to help to add to the family income, I suppose. And, as fate would have it, Vern and Delcie lived a stone’s throw from the house that I grew up in, in the rural countryside southeast of the town of Buchanan, MI. In fact, my mother took piano lessons from Delcie when I was just a boy; I suppose my mother was looking for something to do. Whether or not this is related at all, my mother ended up forcing me to take piano lessons a few years after she stopped taking them. I took my piano lessons from the wife of the youth pastor at our church –she’s was nice, he was a jerk.

The piano that Delcie gave piano lessons on was not the same piano that she loved to play. Delcie played by choice on a baby grand piano, as the stories go; she gave lessons on an upright of a somewhat lesser quality. That upright piano is the piano that my son and one of my daughters practiced their piano lessons on, as it now sits in the “music room” of her granddaughter’s –my wife’s– home.

Which is to say, most likely, that my mother took her lessons with Delcie, when I was a kid, on the piano that her grandchildren –my mother’s grandchildren; my children– would eventually practice their lessons on.

When I was a kid, I practiced my piano lessons on a player piano, which is a piano that is made in such a way that it can play by itself. Modern day player pianos, from what I understand, are mostly electronic, but old player pianos were entirely mechanical. My practices, which I remember being most laborious, involved drills at which my piano teacher expected me to become proficient, and practicing music that I would eventually play for a church service at some point in the future. Needless to say, the inspiration for me to become the world’s greatest concert pianist was never really there.

In recent years, the only person to play the piano at my parents’ house is my father, who, to my knowledge, never took a day of lessons in his life.

My father uses the player piano as a player piano, for entertainment purposes, which is ironic to think about since both my mother and I took lessons to become piano players –who are, technically, entertainers– and neither of us, as far as I know, have ever played that piano, or any other piano, to attempt to entertain anyone. But, when his grandchildren are over, sometimes, and occasionally at parties around the holidays, my dad would play the player piano.

The way that the player piano works is this: it has pedals which you pump up and down. Doing so drives the internal mechanism that turns the rollers on which you place a piano roll. The piano roll rolls as you pedal, and the roll has the music on it that plays the keys on the piano. Different rolls contain different songs.

My memories of my father from my childhood are significantly different, with respect to the man, than the memories that I am building of him as an adult. The father that I remember from my childhood would not have been interested in entertaining anyone through any endeavor.

I take that back.

I have memories of my father from my childhood, now that I’m looking, that are buried away under other memories of who he was around me, as my father. My memories of who he was around me are memories of a stern, serious instructor. My memories of him interacting with others –presumably those he wasn’t responsible for parenting– are memories of a man who loves to entertain. I remember parties that my parents had with their friends over, when I was probably on the very edge of being able to remember things, and my dad was always right in the middle of wherever the fun was happening.

These days, with his grandchildren and great nieces and great nephews all gathered around, my dad can pump the pedals on that player piano and go through roll after roll, song after song, and the keys jump magically up and down on that keyboard and everyone is having a blast.

And you know it’s a small world when Vern and Delcie’s great grandchildren can listen to their former student’s husband pumping the pedals on a player piano just up the street a ways from where their old farmhouse used to be, while their grand-daughter and her husband sit alongside and think of all of the beauty in the world that comes from a piano.