The First Decade

Tomorrow is our 10-year anniversary. We’re going to Fort Worth for a 3 day weekend, with big plans for seeing a couple of movies, watching TV, eating croissants and browsing through the Barnes and Noble bookstore downtown and taking our sweet time doing it.

Of course, I will forever associate this Barnes and Noble with my strangest brush with celebrity to date. Immediately following his keynote address to the Southwest Society for Human Resources Management conference, James Carville apparently had free time on his hands. He killed it by walking around this bookstore, and I passed him on my way to the Starbucks in the back. There was the Ragin’ Cajun himself, looking at books on Texas Hold ‘em Poker, and here was me, carrying the flagship newspaper of conservatism and capitalism (the Wall Street Journal) on my way to a hot cup and a precious hour featuring zero interruptions. It was all I could do not to roll up my newspaper and swat that shiny, bald head of his. “Bad liberal. Baaad liberal!”

While ordering my inexcusably over-priced coffee, I remarked to the young female behind the counter, “Well, I bet it’s not every day you see James Carville just looking around the bookstore”. Her jaw slackened as she asked, “Who?” But her body language said, “Who cares, old man? I’m just trying to get through my shift without jabbing one of these long, metal coffee spoons past my multiple piercings and into my ears to keep from hearing any more exhausting chatter from all the middle-aged doughboys coming through here every day trying to be young and hip, even though they carry the Wall Street Journal under their arm and use words like ‘body language’ and ‘flagship’.” “Nothing,” I mumbled, taking the receipt so I could submit it on my expense report and retreating to a table by the window.

Did you ever get a little buzz from being close to someone famous? Even though he is an obnoxious, Cajun freak who gave a crummy keynote and is so puny-looking in person you know he got picked last for dodge ball, he is still famous. And it was definitely cool just strolling by him not three feet away, looking disinterested and unaffected. The whiplash from having that cool vibe slapped away by some bitter coffee barista barely old enough to vote was unpleasant, and strange.

But Fort Worth is not a town I associate with liberal media darlings, it is the town I associate with MY darling. Our first date was to an Ian Moore concert at the (now closed) Caravan of Dreams in Sundance Square. Subsequent dates involved dining out, making out and just hanging out downtown. We were married there in the First Christian Church, spent our first night together as husband and wife at the Worthington Hotel, and will forever get the feeling of falling in love again whenever we are there together.

It was during those dates, with Shelley, in downtown Fort Worth, 10 years ago that I began to heal. Rehabilitation of my fractured heart began the first time she and I talked on the phone, and I have been cured for quite some time now. There is still some pain there from time to time, but there has not been one minute of one day since I married her that I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life with Shelley. Being loved by her has made the thought of life without her unimaginable.

I’m going to try to find a way to tell her that this weekend.