anniversary

Had a great time celebrating my parents' anniversary with my family. I highly recommend the restaurant Nasu Blanca near Fort McHenry in Baltimore. Offering both Spanish and Japanese dishes on the same menu sounded intriguing and it was executed to excellence on each dish.

Reuniting with immediate family can be wonderfully familiar in a strange way. Does that even make sense? When you revisit pattern family behaviors under the same roof, there's a sense of comfort and awkwardness. Its easy to slip back into the roles which define your youth until you grasp the separation between the adult life you crafted as opposed to the childhood you were raised in. More tellingly, my observant wife is handy for perspective and often comments, "Now I know why you are the way you are." Now she's not necessarily alluding to my shortcomings when she says that. Or at least, that's what I tell myself.

Anyway its funny how memories come back to you while sleeping in your childhood bedroom and following time-honored rituals like sitting in our usual TV watching positions on the couch, hearing tsismis about all the titos and titas, and running the sunday afternoon sequence of church-grocery-lunch.

Once you get past the honeymoon period, you realize the level of work involved in cultivating a loving and lasting relationship. As funny as it may sound, years of marriage taught me to understand divorce. At least the complexities behind the reasons. I've observed friends and co-workers divorcing over a multitude of problems - present day issues, personal issues that have nothing to do with your partner and conflicting visions of the future. Or they just couldn't see themselves growing old together. And I came to an understanding that people can change and things don't always work because people can't always work it out. Anyway, my point is that I've come to the point where I can truly appreciate my parents' 40 years of marriage. When we asked them for any words of wisdom, they didn't reveal anything earth shattering. But when I saw them smiling almost sheepishly at each other, I sensed something overwhelmingly special.