August 7, 2001... I think, if I think really hard I can almost remember the first time he ever said my name. I can remember the first time I saw him. Blue athletic shorts and white sneakers. He was (and still is) quiet at first. I can even see the way he pushed out his lips a little and moved his head to the sound of the music. He was a musician, clearly talented. He had a baby face, clean shaven, smooth and beautiful. I can still hear his music and if I hear Lifehouse it will take me back and I can smell his clean car and wintergreen peppermints. Yes, he was shy but, when he was on stage that all faded away. I remember him hanging from rafters at the Grizzly Bar and playing. I have wonderful memories of that summer. It was my last truly free year in life. The last year that my responsibities were pretty limited to how I was going to organize my social calendar. I think, we knew very little about ourselves and we knew even less about who we would become....
Fast forward almost 8 years and here we are, miles away from our roots. I wear his last name on my name tag at work (hypenated of course :-) ) and I have perfected the "M" in my signature. We were married in Amarillo on a warm evening, May 10, 2003. The whole thing went by so fast and I remember it 6 years later as a blur of candles and red roses. Not that any of that matters, ultimately. If I have learned anything in my marriage it is that perfect weddings, perfect anniversary gifts, perfect memories amount to nothing next to; the mending of broken bridges, the "ah ha" moment of the first time you realize that you were in fact; wrong, the compromise of marriage, the ability to fight and have purpose and to love with understanding. These are, the true stands of marriage. We have gone from being 17 & 20 year old kids to 25 & 28 year old "almost" not kids anymore. We are now husbands and wives, fathers and mothers, son in law, daughter in law. A lot has changed in almost a decade. A lot has remained the same.
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