Ten Years, Man!

As of this Thursday, October 16, Ben and I will have been together for ten years. This anniversary has me reflective. I'll be standing in the kitchen cutting out sugar cookies, a chocolate, but powdered sugar spotted, head at my side, a football game drifting up from the man cave, and I'll suddenly think, "How!?! How did those two goofy kids make all this happen?"

Working with college students, I am constantly reminded of the two people who started this adventure. My students will mention their boyfriends or girlfriends in class or in their poetry journals, and I'll think, "Ah, isn't young love cute?" in a wiser-than-thou adult sort of way, but then it hits me, "No! You have no business saying that. You were these kids!!!" I am still in awe that God would trust the gift that is Ben and my life together to those kids and thankful that we were also given an amazing support system of family and friends who have helped us foster this gift.

So in the spirit of reflection, I pulled out a gift my mother gave me at the end of my freshman year of college. She saved all the emails I sent my parents that year, knowing one day I would enjoy revisiting them. I realized yesterday what a priceless gift it was, especially those emails I sent to them in September and October of 1998. These are 8.5 x 11 reminders of what dorky kids we were, and how it is a miracle that we made it a month, let alone 10 years. Here, for example, is an email I wrote on Sunday, September 20, after Ben and I had our first conversation in the dinner line at school:

At dinner tonight I met a drama boy who is, I think, from Council Bluffs and he LOVES Nebraska football. He was giving me lectures about how Nebraska games are pre-empted for Iowa games. He said he gets the Sunday World Herald and told me to come up whenever I wanted if I wanted to see it. He was funny.

Things that are hysterical about this email:

• The first time I ever refer to Ben, I call him a "drama boy." This is so appropriate on so many levels.


• Our first conversation was about how Nebraska games are pre-empted for Iowa games. Do you know how many times I have heard this rant? Try daily. I laughed out loud when I read this, and when I told Ben about it, he responds thus: "It's so true. I've been surprised how many games we've gotten over here this season. But over here it's all about the Big Ten....blah, blah, blah...Iowa...blah, blah, blah...Indiana...blah, blah, blah...Illinois." (This is how I hear this rant now. I know it sounds terrible, but it's true.) He wasn't even trying to be funny. Ten years later, and he is still giving me the same "lecture."


• The unspoken fact in this email is that homesick me, seeing the Nebraska hat, initiated the conversation. The introverted one started it; this amazes me. What also amazes me is I started a conversation about Nebraska football, and I had no idea that it was Ben's favorite subject.

The next day, my parents got another email from me. This was the day of the fall play try-outs.

Oh, but after the try-outs I went to write something on my sheet and the drama/husker boy came up to me and kind of pointed over my head and said, "YOU were excellent" and I thought he was talking to someone else and he looked at me and said, "I just thought you should know" and I was like, "You were talking to me?" and he said "yes" and I was like, "wow"

And the unspoken here is that after I "was like, 'wow' " I tried to open a locked door and ran into said door. Ben, who was still watching me, said, "You might want to try the other door." Total dorks.

The emails to my parents taper off after this. Let me fill you in on what was going on. There was a lot of standing across from each other and have such riveting conversations as:

Ben: Hi.

Ann: Hi.

Ben: Hi!

Ann: Hi.

Ben: Hi!

Ann: Hi.

Ben once stopped a campus tour he was giving to prospective students and their parents to have this conversation with me. I don't remember how we ever moved past this...Do you see now why it took us 7 1/2 years before we got married?

Well, sometime in October, that drama/husker boy became "Ben" in my emails to my parents, and the rest, as they say, is history.

And I'd say it has been a lovely history. In all my reflection, I've tried to list everything we've been through in the past ten years, but as soon as I start the list, I stop because I realize that doesn't matter. What matters is that through it all, we've been each other's best friend. Even though we were (and still are) dorks, we have a lot of fun together. And it is quite fitting that a homesick girl, desperate for a familiar connection, started this journey by talking to a boy. Because as it turns out, they found a home in each other.

So Thursday we plan to go on a date that was our college standard - going out for blizzards and then taking them to a park to eat them. It was on one of those trips we first admitted that we loved each other. As we sit in Penn Meadows park on Thursday, this time probably accompanied by Puppy, I will think of "Guess it May" by Rosie Thomas. This song speaks so honestly about what it means to be in a long term relationship and the seemingly simple, but ultimately profound, promises two people must make to each other to get through their day to day lives. I couldn't find any videos of Thomas performing the song; all I could find were montages of TV couples set to the song. I ultimately decided on the West Wing montage, even though I know nothing about these characters (basically because I knew even less about the Battlestar Galactica characters). So if this video is horribly out of context, don't make fun of me too much.

Finally, a note on the collage below. We had no pictures of us from this past year, so we had to do a little "photo shoot." The really sappy part of me wants to bore you by showing you all of the photos we took last night. I was holding the camera out and snapping pics while Ben was going on and on about what his motivation should be. (He decided his motivation should be "wistful" which you will see in the photo below). The pictures are fuzzy, off center, and crooked, but I think they are some of my favorite pictures of us. They capture the everyday us - talking, squabbling, kissing, and laughing. When I picked up the proofs of of wedding photos, our photographer looked at me and said, "Ann, he loves you so much. You can just see it in these pictures." Maybe that's just a standard line that a photographer gives to get repeat business, but I like to think it's true. Because when I loaded those pictures on my computer last night and scrolled through them, all I could think was, "We love each other so much. You can see it in these photos."