My wife and I celebrated our 20th in April. Seems like yesterday we were meeting in Odessa. The two months I spent there in the summer of 1999 are some of my best memories. But with two kids now, there have been thousands more (and a few arguments I wish we'd never had).
Second luckiest moment of my life - the instant I saw her photo and wrote to her - despite thinking she was out of my league. Luckiest moment was when she wrote back to me. Of the 50 replies she got to her photo, mine was the only one she responded to. We each took a lucky guess.
The first day we met, we tried to talk for an hour or so, but we could not understand each other. As I walked her to the bus that night, I was thinking that it was just not going to work out. But the next time we met, she brought along her Russian-English dictionary and we painstakingly made ourselves known to each other.
She told me a joke - not so funny except for how she told it, with her thick accent.
One narkoman (drug addict) sayez to anuzzer narkoman, "Next monzz, it vill be May?"
Uzzer narkoman sayez, "No. Next monzz vill be Marsh."
First narkoman sayez, "Zen next monzz, vill be May?"
Anuzzer narkoman sayez, "No. Vill be April."
First narkoman sayez, "I sink ziss year, vill be no May."
Five years later, we were married with two children.
A few years after that, we received the bad news that my adult son from my first marriage had died. The first words out of her mouth were, "Oh, he never even got married." Think about that. Marriage, when it works, is really the most profound thing we ever experience.
So here we are, in the middle of international chaos unlike anything we've seen since before most of us were born. I, normally the breadwinner, jobless. Our little family of four hunkered down together. Our family is what matters most of all. Not the career. Not the schools. Not the politics or the slogans. Not the various diversions that occupied so much of our time only two months ago. Family. A family that would not have come to be if not for two lucky guesses.