It’s a blessing that one should experience these moments. The blessing’s doubled or quadrupled when the feeling lingers with for a time, striking you like an erotic tickle at unpredictable moments throughout the days.
I was sitting on the couch watching a movie. My eyes wandered right. There, not more than five feet from me, sitting on the hearth, talking to the dog was the most beautiful, most lovable, most desirable girl-women I’ve ever laid eyes on.
I gasped inaudibly. My mind recoiled in happy shock. So complete was this joyous surprise that it took me a full fourteen seconds to realize that this beautiful, rare creature is my wife.
When it’s 18 degrees and windy and you’re crossing the street to the big building where you work, your mind slides in funny ways, like a car on icy pavement. You don’t expect to feel like you did that time in the morning in first-grade, wanting desparately, painfully, tearfully to return to your mother’s arms, convinced in the irrational way that six-year-olds are that you might never see her again–or your sisters or your dad. A tornado could wipe them all out, leaving you an orphan. But the day after Angela talked to the dog, I so wanted to turn back to the car and drive to her school and steal her from the kids who get her all day. I wanted to take her home but park a block over and grab her hand and run through the common grounds laughing while she yells, “What are you doing? Where are we going?”
And the guilt. I’m too old, too responsible for such childish frolicking with my dream girl. So I continue into the building and up the stairs, through two sets of double doors, to the left, then the right, to my desk. I take off my coat and hang it carefully on a hook and strike ctrl-alt-del to bring up my log on screen.
And everything reminds me–and I mean everything–that every keystroke this day is for her and for her Creator who blessed me uniquely and undeservingly with human being who shows Him to me in such meaningless moments as a conversation between my wife and a Labrador.