Category: Family

A way to get my wife riled is to remind her of her traffic citation. Her one, sole, lonely, unique traffic citation.

She received it years ago, paid it, and to this day defends her innocence.

I’ve been guilty of all 682 of mine.

Anyway, my wife is the most scrupulous lawn waterer on the planet. In Florida, we have water restrictions due to a dwindling water table, proximity to vast quantities of salt water threatening to encroach upon our water supply, and recent diminished rainfall.

If you want to know what days are legal for watering and which days are not, don’t call the county. Call Barb. She knows. And she abides.

That’s what made it so surprising when our letter carrier delivered a certified letter a few weeks ago bearing a citation accusing Barb of watering the lawn on the wrong day.

Barb was out mowing the lawn at the time (is she a great woman or what?) and I wondered how she would take it.

The facts are that on Monday, we had new grass put in a small patch of the front yard. Doing this entitles homeowners to two weeks of daily watering. However, on Tuesday, the water enforcer came by and found our water feeding the lawn ON THE WRONG DAY. He therefore drew the conclusion that my wife (our water bill is in her name) was a water-use low life needing to learn her lesson.

She already had one (unjust!) stain on her record. No way she was going to let this one stand. So, instead of paying the $100 fine, Barb stood this week before a judge and challenged the justice of the charge and consequent fine.

She won. She proudly pointed out the court papers that labeled the charge as ‘dismissed’.

Message to Mr. Water Enforcer: You don’t tug on superman’s cape, you don’t spit into the wind, you don’t pull the mask off that old lone ranger, and you don’t mess around with Barb.

When I put together a movie/slide presentation of our recent family camping trip, I titled it ‘Shared Calamity – 2009’. That title has a significance that is worth sharing.

Many years ago, Barb and I heard a nationally known speaker/writer on family issues (Gary Smalley) declare (I don’t know if he was serious or not) that the one constant he finds among all happy families is camping. His explanation is that calamity (rain, forgetting the tent poles, losing ones underwear out of the car top carrier into the middle of the interstate, getting stuck in the mud, having a “Little Miss Sunshine van that needs pushing to start) in camping is an inevitability, and when calamity is shared, it is generally bonding. Camping creates experiences of ‘suffering’ which are laughed about years later.

We have had our share of calamity, and we laugh about them. All those in the list above have happened to us. I don’t know where we fall in the scale of family ‘happiness’, but I do know that we all enjoy these times together.

We encourage you to begin your own tradition of calamity!

Quite on a whim a few years ago, we started a family game night. Every Monday night we play a game with whomever happens to be around the house at the time. Normally that consists of Barb and me, two resident daughters, and one boyfriend.

Sometimes, the list is amplified by others our girls invite.

Two weeks ago we were joined by four college students who were traveling the country as summer interns for Chick-fil-A, plus one other CFA employee. That made for a lively and rather rambunctious evening, as we decided to play Curses (a game best played when the players are really tired, or after a glass or two of wine). Lindsay, one of the interns, was ‘cursed’ with having to imitate every motion of our eight-year-old son. She was a good sport about it. (I’ll post a video at the end. Sorry, Lindsay. It’s too good not to share!)

This past week, we were joined by two of our girls’ friends. In addition, there are two young girls, ages 17 and 20, from France visiting the US to practice their English. While here, they are staying with our neighbors across the street. Our daughter invited them to our game night, the poor things. Skip-bo was easy enough to teach them, but as there would sometimes be three English conversations going at once, I’m not sure their English benefited all that much. But they were fun to get to know, and they were wonderful sports about it.

Barb and I know that this stage in life will pass. There will come a time when Monday nights will be quiet. But for now we share in the delight of pretending we are young. It’s a delightful fantasy.

I usually write blog posts at Chick-fil-A while my son and grandson play in the play area. So, the Tuesday night regulars at Chick-fil-A are used to seeing me with my laptop alone at a table.

Tonight, Barb went with me so the computer stayed home. One smart alec said, “I didn’t recognize you without your computer.” However, his wife looked at my wife and said, “Nice upgrade, though.”

I had to agree with that.

Then HPC associate pastor Geoff Henderson’s wife Amy and son Connar joined us. I was surrounded by beauty! A double upgrade.

That today Barb and I mark 31 years of marriage is something of a wonder. We are not just still married. We are still in love.

Is it possible to spend seven (or ten or thirty) years with the same person and still find her (or him) alluring and delightful?

This is the question that I find Hollywood (excluding Pixar) asking in so many movies (such as He’s Just not That into You, which we watched Friday) and giving an answer that if not exactly ‘no’ verges on it.

And it is not just Hollywood. A dear Christian friend confided to me a quarter century ago that she did not know one happily married couple.

To remain committed and in love is not easy, but it is possible. But wherein lies the secret?

That we have kept our vows for 31 years is partly due to the commitment we made to do so, for sure. We entered this relationship with a commitment never to divorce.

Certainly Barb, with her incredible patience and honesty and stability and perseverance makes it easy for me. I honor greatly those men and women who are faithful and supportive to their husbands or wives when they do not receive any love in return. Barb, I am grateful to you.

Ultimately, though, the fact that we celebrate 31 years today is because God has been gracious to give us this gift. It is not something I or she deserve. It is not something that either of us has the strength to preserve. It is a gift of God’s grace. And I cannot thank him enough.

For those with two minutes and and a sentimental streak, watch the video below. It is of two very young and naïve people pledging their lives to one another.

Isn’t the girl in the picture stunning?

Happy anniversary, Barb.

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Note: “7878” is, I guess you could say, “our number”. We were married on 7/8/78.

So I was trying to explain the speed of light to my super curious eight year old. I was doing pretty well given that my knowledge of physics after all these years exists at the very edge of recallable consciousness.

I then went beyond the edge, and tried to explain to him what I thought to be true: that if we could travel at near the speed of light, we could, in theory, go BACK in time, but not come forward.

Colin puzzled over that for a while and determined that to come back to the future, the time traveler would have to go faster than the speed of dark. “Dad, what is the speed of dark?”

Time to change the subject.

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All of this reminds me of a story I read long ago, a short story by science fiction writer Isaac Asimov. Try as I might I can’t find the title of this story. It concerns a man named Stein who committed a crime. In order to evade prosecution, he used a time machine to travel forward in time to emerge one day passed the expiration of the statute of limitations for his crime. He was promptly arrested, charged, and tried. But the judge had to rule that he be released due to the statute of limitations. His ruling was phrased quite tersely: “A niche in time saves stein.”

If anyone can direct me to the book in which this story appeared, I’d be grateful.