No Maybes About It: I Am Amazed

This is the annual celebration of one of the three best days of my life. 

The other two are the natal anniversaries of our children, but this is the biggest and bestest of the three: my wife and I's wedding anniversary.

She can be forgiven if she has slightly less exuberance when this day arrives. Forty-three years of living every single day with O Henry's Red Chief will dampen one's enthusiasms-though it certainly hasn't had that effect on mine. 

I offered what follows some years back in this space and it was then, and will always be, true. Sigrid geboren Schubert, you are the most wonderful thing that has or could have ever happened to me. And I will love you forever and even longer than that.

I Know I Ain't Nobody's Bargain

I was born in April of 1952 but in far more ways than I can explain (and far more than I can ever hope to understand) I think of today as being the day I was really born.

It was on this day in 1977 Sigrid Schubert and I wed in the Federal Republic of Germany, known then as West Germany, at Offenbach am Main's Rathaus at twenty after ten in the morning with Evelyn F, Sigrid's friend, and Chris H, my friend to this very day, as witnesses.

I met her in Sachsenhausen on Christmas Eve night 1976 and I asked her to marry me the following Easter, April 3rd. So suave and debonair was I (not) that she told me later for a moment as I started to ask her to marry me she thought I was breaking up with her. Yep, even then I was Mr. Cool, Calm, and Collected. 

How lucky can one guy get, eh? I've never known what she saw or sees in me aside from a great personality, rapier-like wit complementing a puckish sense of humor, a body like Adonis (Joey Adonis from West Orange over by Prospect Plains), almost hobbled by a nearly crippling sense of modesty that has been my lifelong cross to bear and delusions, (I almost always forgot those) but she is my entire world.  

She is everything I have wanted to be or to do and she makes me a better man by knowing that she loves me, often despite who I am. I can remember the most minute of details of that day and have driven her and both of our adult children to distraction and beyond recounting them incessantly AND also on an annual basis with today as my excuse, so I'll skip them here, but they know what will happen, just not when.

Fur immer und ewig

I hope with all my heart wherever in this world you find yourself that you also have and keep someone who will hold your heart forever as she has mine.  I don't remember often enough to tell her I love her as I should though I will today and I will again vow to be better about that for every day we have together for all the days that remain to us.

Happy Anniversary, angel eyes. 
-bill kenny