Twenty Years

Recently, I was sifting through some old VHS tapes in an effort to convert them over to DVDs. This has been a lengthy, laborious process since we have/had stacks of tapes dating back to the birth of our first child in 1986. (Our first video camera was so large and clunky it looked like it belonged in a television studio and I am surprised we burned so much tape considering the wear and tear on our shoulders. Yes, I said shoulders...) Throughout this process I have made several discoveries:

1. I have a lot of fodder for embarrassing wedding videos as my children marry,
2. We took an awful lot of video of our children as babies... just sitting. (Yet I still find it difficult to edit any of it in the transfer process...),
3. A lot of my friends are still married.

One of the tapes I discovered was a recording of a going away party for Hope and I from 1990. We were moving our young family from Central Florida back to Tallahassee and our core group of friends gathered all of us together for a proper send-off. Besides how young (and thin and hairy) we all looked (uhm, the previous parenthetical statement was aimed at the men ONLY), what jumped out to me was, out of the 13 couples who attended the party (including us), all but one of them are still together.

Twenty years later.

I have no idea why (other than some pretty strong spiritual foundations infused in all of the marriages... okay, that is probably the main reason) but it was nice to see the tape and have that epiphany. Congratulations to my friends. Stay strong. Keep on loving...