DO YOU REMEMBER?

or How To Mark Every Milestone And Ignore Everybody Else

It was like a movie scene.

Well, maybe a movie-of-the-week (if you’re old enough to remember) or a Hallmark movie but still…

She asked me if I wanted to keep trying to make it work and I replied with conviction and no emotion (and this is actually verbatim),
“This marriage is over.”

It sounds dramatic now when I think about it… AND IT WAS.

It was the ending of my first marriage. I had grown weary of all the shagging my then wife was doing with a mutual friend, so I decided I had had enough.

It was freeing. It felt amazing.

I had taken control of my destiny, albeit many shags late, and it felt… right.

Fast forward to better wife, better marriage and 25th Wedding Anniversary for myself and my lovely bride, Shannon.

Truthfully, I don’t remember my parents’ 25th (to be fair I was going through the end of my own first marriage), but I do remember my Aunt and Uncle’s 25th Wedding Anniversary. It’s Silver. It’s a big deal.

Shannon is not a “get a bunch of people together and let’s put the focus on me” type person (opposites attract) so a party was out. A surprise party was also out unless I wanted to get started on my third marriage.

With that in mind, I offered to Shannon that we could go anywhere to celebrate it.

Paris… London… New York.

I even went as far as snagging some hard to get dinner reservations at Balthazar in New York City. We’ve only been there once but Shannon loved it and we also saw the English guy from The Jeffersons eating there, so it’s obviously good and meant for those who are, or have been, movin’ on up.

We planned on flying down on our anniversary, walking around NYC, eating dinner, enjoying a night at the Washington Square Hotel (with a stop at their lobby bar) and then flying home the next day.

What luxury! Surely no one would then be able to fault us for not celebrating our 25th Anniversary properly.

We sat on it a bit and then it dawned on us…

It felt like we were doing this elaborate New York trip just so we could feel like we’d celebrated ‘properly’. It felt less about what we wanted to do and more of what we felt we were expected to do.

So… if we took command of our own choices, what DID we want to do?

Something simple. Something us.

We got married in our backyard because we felt it was more “us”.
We started our own business because we felt it was more “us”.
In fact, as we started to think about it, everything single good thing we’d done to date was because we felt it was more “us”.

So we cancelled our New York plans. We’ll go there another time.

We headed to Kingston. Where we met.
We sat in a pub for a couple of hours and chatted.
We went for dinner at a chain restaurant.
We went back to our fabulous hotel room with a stunning view.
We got up and had breakfast in the room.
We toured Kingston City Hall.
We had lunch at a pub we hadn’t been to before.
We had dinner at a higher end restaurant.
We went back to our hotel, had a nightcap, went to sleep and drove home the next day.

I’ll never forget it.

Once you take command of your of own choices, you almost always end up doing what’s best for you. At least, that’s what I’ve found.

Celebrate however you want.
Life your best life the way YOU want to live it.

Sit in a pub and start a wonderful afternoon by asking “Do you remember…?”

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(Pictured: Author [middle not the other guy] demonstrates great ventriloquist trick minus puppet while wife ponders life choices)