Happy Twenty-Eighth First-Meeting-My-Wife Anniversary...Plus One Day

There's an advantage to keeping a daily journal...

For thirty-five years.

Pick a day going back to January 25th, 1985, and I can tell you something about that day. Most of what's in those seventy journals is straight-up boring, not interesting at all. Then, because it's all written down, there's facts and stories that--if they weren't written down--I'm sure I'd forget.

Case in point, the day I met my future wife.

Twenty-eight years ago I was finishing up my senior year of college. I was in a university choir, one of three at the U of U. A friend had a brilliant idea. She organized a retreat and invited all the choirs to attend. I went, so did my wife-to-be. She was in another choir. Had that retreat at Sherwood Hills up Sardine Canyon in Northern Utah not occurred, chances are we may not have ever met.

Today, my wife said it was the twenty-eighth anniversary of the day we met. I climbed up and retrieved the journal that covered that period of time. I found February 9th, 1992 and realized...yes, it was the  twenty-eighth anniversary of the day we first met, plus a day. We met February 8th, 1992.

So, we're a day off. The important thing is it's something between us. We first met and started dating in February. We were married later that year in 1992. February's a good month for us.

The journals sit on the shelf, all in a row. There are some volumes that I put on the shelf and I haven't touched them since. Yes, there's a lot of facts and stories contained in those journals. Sometimes they tell us important things, like anniversaries when our lives changed forever.