This is our anniversary week. Happy Anniversary beloved. You were my adolescent fantasy and are my adult reality.

Erich Fromm wrote in the Art of Loving: “Love is not primarily a relationship to a specific person; it is an attitude, an orientation of character which determines the relatedness of a person to the world as a whole, not towards one ‘object’ of love. If a person loves only one other person and is indifferent to the rest of his fellow men, his love is not love but a symbiotic attachment, or an enlarged egotism.”

My years with you have been the development and evolution of this attitude. Dance me to the end of love.

Joan Didion writes in ‘The Year of Magical Thinking’: “Marriage is memory, marriage is time… Marriage is not only time: it is also, paradoxically, the denial of time. For forty years I saw myself through John’s eyes. I did not age.” Maybe that is why, though we’ve revelled in each other’s company for more than half of our lives, I still feel like a high school kid out on his first date when we’re together.

We’ve had good times, bad times and “in between” times. I still cannot listen to Leonard Cohen say “Dance me to the children who are asking to be born” without feeling grief at our dreams that may never come to pass. But then we’ve had so much happiness together, I’d be a fool to be not grateful and feel blessed.

So, wishing us love and happiness, happy anniversary again.