The Friday of anniversary week, we left school and headed toward Tennessee. Most of my wife’s family lives there in the Clarksville and Nashville area. It was our destination for the conclusion of our nine day celebration.
I had known what I was getting for our anniversary for a couple of months, and there wasn’t any attempt at surprise involved. I had to wait until Sunday, though. My gift wasn’t a thing to possess; it was an experience.
I have been a passionate Philadelphia Eagle fan my entire life and the Eagles were playing the Tennessee Titans that Sunday. My gift was two tickets to the game. Of course, my wife and all her family there are Titans fans, so that would normally have made her the enemy for those three hours, but remember, everything had changed.
Well, not everything. She still cheered for the Titans, but instead of a smack talking rivalry like it was in the past, we both almost wanted the other team to win so that the other person wouldn’t feel bad. We each wore our team’s colors, but we couldn’t really be on opposite sides in any serious kind of way.
On Saturday, we had some down time and we were hungry, so we headed into Clarksville for something to eat. We were only two beers away from the t-shirts, and we knew there was an Old Chicago near the mall, so in we went. That made three times in one week, two in Springfield, and one there.
I did talk some smack to the waiter, who gave it right back. Our last beer was the “manager’s brown bag” choice, where they bring you a beer of their choosing in a paper sack, so you don’t know what it’s going to be. He brought me a beer that was awful, and we’re both pretty sure he knew that, but we laughed about it and took it as all part of the fun.
We stayed with my brother-in-law and his family that night. He’s the one who taught us about beer, and I’ve spent the same number of years trying to teach him about wine. He bought the ingredients and I cooked pasta puttanesca for everyone that night. It’s been a favorite of ours ever since I got the recipe from a chef in Sonoma, California a few years ago. Later that evening, we used his backyard fire pit to make smores.
The next morning, we headed to the stadium and watched the Eagles lose badly. It wasn’t the outcome I hoped for, but I was there with the love of my life, and at that point, I knew what it was important. It wasn’t the score in a football game. It was the love we had rediscovered and now were living.
You won’t find a lot of significance in most people’s 14th anniversary. It’s not one of the “big” years, but for us, there has never been one bigger, nor will there probably ever be. A few months before, we had gone to the edge and looked down. During that week, it was all about having made a complete 180, and never looking back. The confusion and the mistakes of the past were behind us, and it really was an anniversary that was much too big for just one day.
The Restoration Tour 