October 14: Went About With Him, 24th Wedding Anniversary, My Favorite Things

Everyone beamed at him [Zaphod], or at least, nearly everyone.  He singled out Trillian from the crowd.  Trillian was a girl that Zaphod had picked up recently while visiting a planet, just for fum, incognito.  She was slim, darkish, humanoid, with long waves of black hair, a full mouth, an odd little knob of a nose and ridiculously brown eyes.  With her red head scarf knotted in that particular way and her long flowing silky brown dress, she looked vaguely Arabic.  Not that anyone there had ever heard of an Arab of course.  The Arabs had very recently ceased to exist, and even when they had existed they were five hundred thousand light-years from Damogran.  Trillian wasn't anybody in particular, or so Zaphod claimed.  She just went about with him rather a lot and told him what she thought of him.

There is no real love story in Hitchhiker's, unless you count Zaphod Beeblebrox being in love with himself.  The closest to a "normal" love relationship is the one between Zaphod and his girlfriend, the Earth woman, Trillian.  According to the passage above, Trillian "just went about with him rather a lot."  That's it.  No real commitment to each other.  They are conveniently involved, each giving the other something the other needs.  Zaphod needs a glamorous girl on his arm at governmental occasions, and Trillian needs someone to get her off her home planet.

Today is my 24th wedding anniversary.  That number surprises a lot of people.  It certainly surprises me.  It hardly seems possible that my wife and I have been married for close to a quarter century.  We have been through some pretty rocky times.  Yet, here we are--still together, still in love, still struggling with life's slings and arrows.

I have written essays and blog posts and poems about our life together, chronicling both the good and not so good.  Tonight, however, I want to simply tell you some of my favorite things about my wife:

• She can make me laugh, even at my very worst times.
• When I'm feeling particularly beaten down, she doesn't try to fill me up with false praise or empty hope.  She just loves me in my misery.
• She loves my poetry.
• She will tell me when a poem I write is crap.
• She tells me when I've fixed that crappy poem.
• She gave me two beautiful kids who have filled my existence on this planet with meaning.
• She forces me to be a better person than I am.
• She gave me another family to love--her sisters and cousins and nieces and nephews.  She multiplied my love.
• She has taught me that love is full of peaks and valleys.  Highs and lows.
• To this day, she is still the most beautiful woman I've ever known.
• She isn't perfect, and she doesn't expect me to be perfect.
• When I climb into bed tonight, I will feel her body next to mine.  She will keep me warm in the darkness.

Saint Marty thanks his endless love for 24 of the best years of his life.