MILESTONES

It is my understanding that “blog” is a contraction of “web log,” which carries with it the implication that a blog will be someone’s account of matters personal.  This blog, for the most part, has failed at that effort, including instead extended discussions of intellectual and political topics that can only by the loosest construction be called “personal.”  Still and all, I feel a certain residual obligation to adopt the confessional voice, so I am happy to announce that today Susie and I mark our twenty-ninth anniversary.  We shall celebrate by trying out a restaurant called St. Jacques in Raleigh that bills itself as offering authentic French cuisine.  Inasmuch as it is located in a mall, I am perhaps understandably a trifle skeptical, but the on-line menu does list frogs’ legs, which Susie particularly likes, so perhaps the evening will go well.

Twenty-nine years is a good run, but hardly remarkable.  Perhaps more noteworthy is the fact that later on in the fall, we shall reach the sixty-eighth anniversary of our first date.  I was fourteen and smitten with the pretty girl sitting at the desk in front of me in home room in Forest Hills High School.  I got up the courage to ask her out on a date [a revival of Marcel Pagnol’s pre-war film César], and we went steady for five years.  It then took me another thirty-two years to marry her. 

Nobody ever accused me of being a fast worker.