She never ceases to surprise me....

I've been married to Bern since 1970. Jesus, that's 43 years!!!

We met when I was 17 and she was 14, if you can believe it, and have pretty much been an item of one kind or another since then. That makes it almost 49 years. What were we thinking? This kind of thing isn't supposed to happen any more....

But there is this: she never ceases to surprise me.

I've often told people I've had 5 or 6 marriages, they've just all been to the same woman. And we have carved out different eras, like geological strata, one covering the one before, but you can dig down through them and excavate pieces of previous marriages.

For example, about the surprises me part: she came home from the grocery store today with a bag of dry food for our Cat, Luke. It is, like the food our dog eats, very healthy. Luke has dry food always available and wet food of one kind or another twice a day. He can be finicky about food, but he weighs about 20 pounds, so he's not starving.

I stated the obvious. "Luke won't eat this stuff."

And Bern said, unpacking bags and putting things away, "well, if he doesn't want to eat, it's just as well that he doesn't eat something that's good for him...."

I've been thinking about that ever since. There is a kind of logic to her thinking....and then, well, the logic implodes.

She's the practical one and I'm the one wandering through life as if there must be a point to it all if I could only find it.

"If he doesn't eat, it's best he doesn't eat what's good for him" is something I've been unable, in the several hours since she said it, to get my head around.

Then SURPRISE and confusion and serendipity might just be what causes people to hang out together fro nearly half a century.

I'm pondering that for a bit....