Back in the seventies, Wendell and I grabbed Jim Croce’s Time in a Bottle as Our Song. (Our first song was actually Dead Skunk in the Middle of the Road, but that is a story for another post. We selected the more romantic one later on.) We talked about growing old even before we left high school completely behind. It was as if in all our bell-bottomed wisdom we knew what was going to happen. We knew we would walk down that aisle on a Tuesday evening in May, pledge our eternal love, and then turn around and discover we are the grandparents of the school’s quarterback. (Our quarterbacks are all in middle school right now, but they will be pro’s before we blink again.)

This weekend, we are celebrating Wendell’s fortieth high school reunion. It won’t be much of a splash for us. We will mostly just go to dinner with a few old friends and swap grandchildren stories. But the milestone gives me pause, nonetheless.

And, it also gives me the most amazing revelation. I have no regrets.

Wendell and I have spent thirty-nine of those forty years smack-dab together. We’ve had good times and bad times and times so hard we weren’t sure we’d survive. But, we did. And I am grateful now for every experience. I don’t understand all of them yet, and I’d gladly change a couple of outcomes if it were up to me. But I’m grateful for how we walked through them and how we came out of them stronger. Better.

We have never been able to save time in a bottle (Though the psalmist says God collects our tears that way.) We have bottled a lot of memories, though. And we plan to make a lot more in the next forty years. Then, when we are really, really old we will just shake the bottle up and let the memories explode like champaign around us.

Then, we’ll sing a chorus of Dead Skunk just for fun. Everybody now, “Dead Skunk in the middle of the road, dead skunk in the middle of the road…”