Thanks for the wishes!!! It was indeed a great day.
I wrote the following note in my anniversary card to the fetching Mrs. Starsky, and we exchanged our cards at the restaurant last nite:
(Wife's first name),
I’ll type this and spare you my lousy handwriting, LOL, and because it’s easier to share my heart with you when I can write it faster.
There is so much going through my mind and through my heart this anniversary – it seems somehow qualitatively different from the others. Not just quantitatively different, because, you know it’s our 30th and all, but different in quality. I think more than anything I feel GRATITUDE today – gratitude to God for giving you to me to begin with and for helping us save our marriage, and then gratitude to you for all of the things you’ve done for me – and to help me – over these 30 years.
I have a hard time sometimes focusing on what I have instead of on what I don’t have, and I’ve made a conscious effort the last couple of years to really work on GRATITUDE in my life. And there is nothing (along with my children and my grandchildren) that I have more grateful for than YOU. :o)
I am so very thankful also that not only did we put Humpty Dumpty together again these past eight years, but now all of that work is bearing fruit in the lives of our friends and our family who see our faith and our effort and our character, and how marriage is not something that you just chuck away when it gets tough.
Even REALLY tough.
Through all of the frequent doubts I have in my life about things I do *not* do well, this is something that makes me really pleased when I think about it, and it’s a gift that we have given to our children (and that I pray they will teach to their children).
I can’t even imagine now if I had lost you. Through our crap, and through various (thankfully minor!) momentary health scares (and maybe just because we’re getting older, or maybe because we lost your dad this year?) I do think about that now sometimes. And it feels so EMPTY to think of not being married to you. :o(
So tonite I thank you for all of the BIG things you do (like mentor our daughters, and forgive your husband, and honor your mother and your father) and for all of the “little” things we share, too, that are so very special to me (think “hot-buttered popcorn and The Blacklist,” or “day dates,” or “date nights” or our silly moments with our beloved pets). And I celebrate with a grateful heart all we have been given to share these past 30 years as husband and wife, and I truly thank my God upon every remembrance of you!
