40 Years Now, Where'd They go?

A first dativersary...

I’ve always loved the Bob Seger song, ‘Like a Rock.’ Jan took me to see him a couple of years ago in Greenville, SC. His music was as moving as ever. He has been called ‘the poet of the American Man’s soul.’ I couldn’t agree more.

One of the verses of ‘Like a Rock,’ is as follows:

‘Twenty years now
Where'd they go?
Twenty years
I don't know
I sit and I wonder sometimes
Where they've gone.’

Well I suppose I have to ask the same now. But with a slight change because it’s ‘Forty years now, where’d they go?’

Today is forty years since Jan and I went on our first date. We were sophomores at Marshall University, living in the Twin Towers dormitories. We had met at a Halloween Party the October before. Over the ensuing months we spent more and more time together. One day after Christmas break, while snow-tubing in a local park, we very nearly kissed. We had, as they say, ‘a moment.’

Eventually I got around to asking her out. Like so many couples who have lived life together, we have some uncertainty about what that first date was. Like the song from Gigi, ‘Ah yes, I remember it well!’

We’re pretty sure it was dinner and a comedy show. (For those who were traveling along at the same time, it might have been at The Old Library.)

It matters little. It was a start. It was a spark. And in the ensuing years, through school and marriage, moves and children, jobs, house building, debt, sickness and health, we arrived here. That’s where forty years went. Into a deep, abiding, ever growing love. Into our memories, into our bodies, into our DNA and into our now adult children. Into the stories we share, the wounds we inflicted and forgave, the date nights that continue to this day and the hopes for the future.

Bob Seger wasn’t the one who performed ‘our song.’ That was Billy Joel. (We saw him in NYC before the pandemic.) And the song was ‘For the Longest Time.’

Verse 5 goes:

‘I don’t care what consequence it brings

I have been a fool for lesser things

I want you so bad

I think you ought to know that

I intend to hold you for the longest time.’

Happy 40th my dear. Here’s to a whole bunch more. Looking forward to our next date night.