50th Anniversary

No, it's not the full anniversary. That won't be until 8/14/26.  But fifty years ago tonight, Tracy and I took a walk late in the evening at college.  The walk was enchanted, and I was enchanted.  It took a few weeks for her to become enchanted, but we agree this was the real beginning. We had met the first day of classes September 1971 and been friendly acquaintances since, though with no hint of romance.

I had been feeling the frustration of uncommitted relationships, and girls who changed the subject whenever I brought up marriage and especially children, all the way back to late highschool. True to form all but one of them married late or not at all and had no children. (Just to make the narrative confused, there was one girl, Damsel #5, who did give me credit for rescuing her as she got over a rotter of a boyfriend, but I just sad-sacked about for a few months and it was unrequited.  She went on to have eight children and we still correspond with her. Ruins the data. Yet I digress.)

Tracy was immediately a breath of fresh air, as she discussed that first night what her own upbringing and relationship with her parents had been like, and how she thought this would influence her own parenting. I described being very close to my brother and thinking I might like to name my first son after him. So Jonathan was named that first walk, though he was not born until five-and-a-half years after. We decided in retrospect that as our college years were counting down, we were both testing the other quite quickly about long-term plans. I'm not sure either of us would have signed on if we had known this would eventually mean three foster children and five sons, but that is how it turned out, and at a school with a lot of hypercompetitive people looking for careers, I'm not sure we would have found any takers for that. God usually hides from us where the story is likely to be going.