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Forty years ago this Saturday, Wendell and I sat down at Pizza Hut together and shared our first ham sandwich. Well, we didn’t actually eat any of it. But we ordered one, along with a Coke (me) and a glass of milk (him.) We both had long hair, although mine was longer, thank goodness. And hip-hugging bell-bottoms and platform shoes. (His were taller.)

People of our generation were still in Viet Nam, so everyone was trying to grab life before it marched off in a uniform never to return. I was a starry-eyed high-school senior and Wendell was a college man I’d met a couple of times before. Needless to say, I swooned.

But what really happened that night is that Wendell told me the future. “I want to be a doctor,” he said. “Not some kind of specialist who goes for a city practice where he can make loads of money. I want to be a family doctor who helps bring babies into the world, sets their broken bones in childhood, helps them grow up, and then delivers their own babies someday.”

I signed on right there over the ham sandwich.

Neither of us have long hair anymore, and we don’t birth any babies in our clinic. But, other than that, we are doing pretty much what Wendell described when he was nineteen. He just left out the part where we steal a kiss in the hallway several times a day…