How Am I Grateful For Thee? Let Me Count The Ways
A photo caption can’t do justice to my Shannon. And one of my mottos is, Why Say Something in 25 Words When 800 Will Do? I have other good mottos too, like, Pizza! Pizza! And, Move Over Rover Let Chucky Take Over. But they are mostly inapplicable to Shannon. And this is all about Shannon.
How am I grateful for Shannon? Let me count the ways… seven thousand nine hundred and twelve. There are seven thousand nine hundred and twelve ways. I will only share four though, because none of you like me enough to read about the other seven thousand nine hundred and eight ways. And I agree with you on that — I don’t like myself enough to write about them.
Shannon blesses Easter egg hunting proceedings with her benevolent presence (April 2019)
1. Shannon never wakes up grumpy. Ev-ah. I will not lie — this is annoying sometimes. Like when I wake up and I didn’t sleep well and my back hurts and Shannon says all perky like, “HI!! ISN’T IT A BEAUTIFUL MORNING DO YOU WANT TOAST GOOD THE TOASTER IS OVER THERE!!” But I jest. Her unfailing positivity at any hour is a welcome balance to my, um, “realism.” Without Shannon to balance me out, I would be an insufferable human being. Well, what I mean is I would be more of an insufferable human being than I already am.
2. Shannon never runs out of things to talk about. The last time me and Shannon had an awkward silence was in the autumn of 2001 when we’d just met and we were driving back from a date one afternoon about 4:30 pm. I said, “So, what are you going to do when you get home?” Shannon said, “I’m going to wash my car.” I really liked spending time with her, so I said, “Oh, that’s cool. I can help you wash it if you want.” She said, “No.” But she said it so immediately and so sharply that there was clearly no room for negotiation. I was a little stung, and she didn’t say anything else, so we just drove the rest of the way home in silence. And I was filled with sadness, and also with a sneaking sense of relief because I don’t actually like hand-washing cars.
I learned later that the reason she didn’t want me to help her wash her car is because she had another date at 5. I guess it would’ve been awkward if I’d have been there when the next guy came to pick her up. That other guy was a loser though, and so were the two guys she went out with that same day before our date (that’s four dates in one day — might be some kind of record). I was a loser too, but a little less than the others. That’s why Shannon liked me. And we’ve been having great conversations ever since! Except when Shannon is grocery shopping. She doesn’t like to talk when she’s shopping and I’m pushing the cart. I guess nobody’s perfect.
3. Shannon refuses to compromise on her principles. I am thinking particularly of the principle that she does not like sports. You would think that over the course of almost 20 years of marriage she would soften her position, yield on her values a bit, you know? Not so. Once, when we were dating, I asked Shannon to go to a football game with me and my roommates. She said, “I would rather have thumbscrews.” After we clarified that she preferred thumbscrews to football and not to hanging out with me, I felt impressed with her bold stance. And she was cute, so I asked her to marry me. She didn’t say, “I’d rather have thumbscrews,” so I took that as a yes.
4. Shannon likes me. Having observed myself for the past 41 years, I am pretty sure that I’m not the easiest person to live with. Sometimes I think about alternate universes where I never met Shannon and events took me in different directions with other people, and I think that probably I get pushed down the stairs sometimes in those alternate universes, after my alternate-universe-wife is like, “Where did that guitar and amp come from?” and I’m like, “I bought them yesterday. The guitar is blue it’s so pretty I was going to ask you if I could buy it but it’s so pretty so I just hocked the vacuum cleaner and the Crockpot. And the Subaru.” But Shannon is even-keeled and only seems to see the best in others, and that time I fell down the stairs and Shannon was standing at the top laughing, that was just an accident.
Yes, I’m grateful for all the goodness of Shannon. Grateful we fell in love and stay in love. How does it all happen? Who knows the subtle ways of love? Only the Righteous Brothers. They are the only ones.
