Life of Wry

I say ish because it was actually twenty years ago yesterday, it being the day Jim and I decided to get married.

I always remember the day because March 30 was my dad’s birthday, so that made it easy. Not that our deciding to get married had anything to do with my dad’s birthday.

We just happened to be sitting on the wall in Central Park, on a Saturday morning in March, twenty years ago… and thought, hey, let’s do it, let’s get married! We’d been dating about fifteen months or so, had been living together for about six… and well, it seemed like a good idea. I had just turned 40, Jim was about to turn 43… it seemed about time.

I remember we’d wanted to settle the kid question first–to have one or not–but just couldn’t decide. Both seemed like such great options. (And we know how that turned out, and how we can’t even imagine not having a kid (exclamation point to the billionth power).) At the time, we’d enlisted the guidance of a therapist to help us sort through the pros and cons, but after six months hadn’t arrived at anything conclusive. It wasn’t a deal breaker for either of us, as it turned out. We finally thought, oh, what the heck, let’s just get married and we’ll figure it out later. Which, obviously, we did.

Anyway… twenty years ago. A lifetime. Peter’s as a matter of fact, as he sits on the cusp of turning 18!

So, we had a six month engagement, as it were. In September, we will celebrate the big milestone (our twentieth anniversary).

I went to the photo archive to find a nice picture of Jim and me, or two…  but oh how difficult that was. A few months ago, my photo archive was very well organized, I had dozens and dozens of sorted albums, including one called, “Best of Jim and Kari,” but, as I’ve lamented here before, I lost all of my albums a couple months ago when I moved all my data from my old laptop to my current laptop–the result of iPhoto becoming obsolete and being replaced by Photos (thanks a lot, Apple). I still have all my photos, I just lost the organizing metadata, so my 70,000 photos exist as one huge unsorted database (gratefully, they are in chronological order). Anyway… makes it hard to find particular photos.

Still…   I managed to find a few… and will post at least those, random as they are..

Here’s one at the beach, near Goat Rock.. this was just prior to our receiving a tsunami warning, as I recall (hmm, what to do, what to do.. think we oughta get to higher ground?):

Here’s one that Peter took after about an 11-12 mile hike up to May Lake and down Murphy Creek near Tuolumne Meadows:

This one’s near the grand arch in Arches National Park in Utah; I think Peter took this one, too:

And a couple of nice ones of Jim, just to show that he doesn’t always wear that hat… the first is from my Uncle Bud’s 90th birthday, just a little over a year ago. I like the unposed, uncharacteristic capture, even though blurry:

And this one… I forgot to note the time stamp on it… it’s near a window’s about all I know. I just like it, all nice and glowy:

Happy engagement anniversary, yesterday, Jim!