🧩 Today’s Puzzle Pieces 🧩
Cutie 🎶
Bad Poetry 🖋️
Marriage ⚭
THE DAILY UPDATE
Three Things I’m Grateful For Today:
- My marriage
- My baseball team
- My bracket not being totally busted after Day One (It will be by the end of Day Two, to be sure)
Pursuit of Wordle Godhood: Today’s result: Four
Wordle 1,007 4/6
⬜🟩⬜⬜⬜
⬜🟩⬜🟨⬜
🟩🟩🟩🟩⬜
🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩
Pursuit of Connections Godhood: FAIL! I call bullshit on “breaking.”
Connections
Puzzle #285
🟨🟨🟦🟨
🟪🟩🟦🟨
🟩🟩🟩🟩
🟨🟨🟨🟨
🟪🟦🟦🟦
🟪🟪🟪🟦
The song in my head when I woke up: The return of Death Cab For Cutie to my morning brain, with “I Will Follow You Into The Dark.”
Favorite line from the song in my head when I woke up: If heaven and hell decide/That they both are satisfied/Illuminate the no’s on their vacancy signs/If there’s no one beside you/When your soul embarks/Then I’ll follow you into the dark.
Commute Tunes: It’s a WFH Friday, so no commute (thank God, because commuters have been increasingly stupid this week.)
Something I’m looking forward to today: My anniversary dinner with Wifey Poo. Twenty-seven years, baby!
Something I’m looking forward to in the next seven days: Tomorrow’s Waffle House Fantasy Baseball League draft.
Something I’m grateful for from yesterday: Having outdoor baseball practice with my team on a cool spring day.
What I’m writing: Yesterday’s Two Crappy Pages was writing about a priest who talked about the role of prayer being central to a good life.
What I’ve written: I don’t often write poetry. Because I suck at it. But sometimes I do write poetry. And it sucks. The Significant Things
Today’s Stoic Though of the Day: “What is it then to be properly educated? … To separate the things that lie within our power from those that don’t.” — Epictetus
John’s translation of Today’s STD: “Yeah, that’s a great variety of diplomas hanging on your wall, so would you please explain to me one thing? Why are you still so fucking stupid. Diplomas are a sign of intelligence about as much as wearing shoes is a sign that you’re walking. Use that damn thing rattling around your skull to have awareness of what you can actually have an effect on, and then go do that.”
Father Tom didn’t want to talk with me. How do I know this? Well, because in reply to an email I had asking to interview the 92-year-old priest about his long and colorful life, he said the Catholic-polite (See also: Minnesota Nice) equivalent of “I don’t want to talk with you.”
Ahhh, but I’m not the world-famous writer and reporter that I am because I am deterred easily by a “No.” I’m also not a world-famous writer and reporter, but that’s neither here nor there. So, eventually, Father Tom agreed to meet with me at the senior community where he lives.
We sat down in what i imagine the 17 retired-priest residents call a day room. Father Tom immediately let me know he still wasn’t sold on talking to me. Eventually, I persuaded him.
What followed was an hour-plus conversation about his time as a priest in Greenland, Colorado and Alaska, as well as in-depth stories about his work as a military chaplain embedded with troops during the Vietnam War. Father Tom is nearly 92, and he is a fascinating individual who doesn’t act like a stereotypical priest. I found endless humor in hearing him casually drop an F-bomb, telling me he thinks Purgatory is “bullshit” and that the real saints aren’t those anointed by the Catholic hierarchy but rather the married couples who stick it out and create better lives for their children and grandchildren.
It was on that last topic that we spent the last half-hour delving into. My reporter’s notebook was put away, and we talked about my next-day anniversary, my two boys here and my angel baby in heaven. He talked to me about officiating ceremonies for couples married 50, 55, 65 years and how he starts them out.
“I look at both of them and I ask one simple question,” he said. “How many times have you forgiven each other?”
I immediately thought about my own marriage, which reaches the twenty-fucking-seven year mark today. I don’t think there are enough fingers and toes in the world to count the combined number of forgivenesses between Wifey Poo and I, though I must admit, if our individual tallies were put on opposite sides of a scale, hers would be much, much heavier.
“You can’t love without forgiveness, and you can’t forgive without love,” Father Tom told me. And he’s right. The two are as linked as peanut butter and jelly, Mork and Mindy, Kentucky and first-round NCAA flameouts. You don’t reach 27 years in marriage — hell, you don’t reach one year in marriage — without plenty of forgiveness.
The human animal is an interesting creature. We are drawn to be together, yet as soon as we gather in community — be that two or two hundred — we annoy the ever-loving hell out of each other. Still, we stay together, and hermits are shockingly the rare exception.
Father Tom asked me, “Are you the same person you were when you married your wife?”
Absolutely not.
“Is she?”
More than I, yes, but still, absolutely not.
Yet here we are, with so much good behind us that we share. Our boys. Our laughter. Even our tears and sadness is good, in a way, simply because it’s ours.
I have been married to Wifey Poo for 27 years now. That’s a long time. I’ve known her for more than three decades. That’s as super long time. No one knows the future, but what I do know is that, for however long that future is between us, it most definitely will have those two elements that Father Tom put front and center for me yesterday.
Love.
Forgiveness.
Remember that, kids.
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