FOUR FIVE

Today, Kitty and I celebrate our forty-fifth anniversary.  It's been a great ride and we're looking forward to many more years together.

On March 26, 1970, she was still in college.  I had graduated and still had my beard.  We married in Concordia Hall at what was then Lowell State College, now UMass Lowell, followed by a champagne reception which ran out of champage -- relatives and friends were very thirsty that day.  If I have ever done something that was totally and perfectly right, it was on that day.

 Kitty was the most beautiful woman I have ever met.  Smart, funny, compassionate.

She still is.  Her eyes have the same sparkle.  Her smile can still melt me.  She has made me a much better person.

We both have added a bit of mileage over the past forty-five years and she thinks I am just being polite when I tell her how lovely she is.  I guess she just can't tell the difference between politeness and the truth.  She is beautiful and I am the luckiest man on earth.

I'm still not sure how a schlub like me ended up with a woman like her, but you but you will never catch me complaining.

Two children and five grandchildren later, I look back on that day in 1970 with wonder and gratitude.  The time before that is a hazy fog, for it was forty-five years ago today that my life truly began.