I remember sitting at the Bothell Post Office
break room in 1986 eating a sandwich before
going out to deliver the mail in Holly Hills.
The "New kid", Terry, was about twenty-five
and he was babbling on about his job at a marina
on Vashon Island.
I was struck that his head looked perfectly round
like Charlie Brown.
His awful, long straggly beard reminded me
of serial killer Charles Manson.
He seemed friendly enough.
About a month later he called me at home.
I had no idea who he was since he hadn't generated
much interest to me but he said he worked with me.
That seemed odd because our personal information
is not allowed to be given out.
He admitted years later that while he was working
late one time he went in the supervisor's desk and
got my phone number.
He sounded nice and I had been looking for a
health club buddy and invited him to go.
We went for about six months and got to be friends.
He was still nasty-looking but when I showed my
sister Pam a photograph of him she exclaimed,
"He looks like a movie star!"
I thought he looked like an ugly cross of
Charlie Brown and Charles Manson.
So I asked him to trim his beard one day
and low and behold, he did look like a movie star.
Geez I was so shallow back at twenty-nine!
So we started shacking up at the end of 1986
and got married in 1992.
Now on our nineteenth wedding anniversary
It does not bother me that he is very fat
because there is more of him to love.
It does not bother me that I need to run
my weed-wacker over his chest and back
if I want to feel his skin
because he is my giant 270 LB Teddy Bear.
It doesn't bother me that his front tooth is black
from getting elbowed in a basketball game
because some hot forty-year old won't want to steal him.
What DOES bother me is that
when he sits in his gold recliner,
and I walk past him,
I see his expiration mark
showing through his thinning hair.
And I know I only have twenty or thirty years left
to love him.
Now THAT bothers me.
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