An ode to my wife: “I went to my girlfriend’s apartment.  She opened the door and the smell of bacon came pouring out.  There were two pounds of bacon in her oven.  At the time, I did not know you could cook bacon en masse in the oven.  Likewise, I had no idea what any one person needed two pounds of bacon for.’Oh I don’t,’ she told me. ‘I need the drippings.’We were married within a year.It has not been the easiest time – now almost thirteen years. Within three months of marriage, both of us at twenty-five, she had a double mastectomy and I my own lesser surgeries. It was a novel way to start a marriage.  But now we have two wonderful children who always delight and surprise us. Our great controversy now is whether to finally tell the seven year old it is ‘route guidance’ and not ‘Ralph guidance.’ It is so endearing, but she cannot figure out why Ralph has a female voice. The four year old presents his own, all boy, problems. Waking Dad up at sunrise by body slamming is not as appealing as it might sound. Just the other day he surmised that if the sandman leaves sand in your eyes at night, the boogie man must be responsible for the boogers in your nose.Through it all I travel a great deal. Last month, according to Delta, I traveled 13,500 miles. While I am away, my wife is the full time mother hen. She is ever present in the kids’ lives. Even when I am home, I work three jobs so she can be home with the kids. They bake, they play outside, she sews an assortment of clothes, quilts, and travel bags. She shuttles them to school, ukulele lessons, and doctors’ appointments.While carrying our now four year old, my wife decided she needed exercise. She took up skateboarding. Her doctor was impressed. A few weeks ago, having spent the last few years growing her hair out, she cut it off, gave it locks of love, and came home with some not very subtle purple highlights. It was actually pretty awesome.”

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