Soaring

When I met him, he was big and strong. His smile lit up the room...well, at least to me. I remember his laugh, loud and self-assured. Muscles bulged on his well-sculpted body, yet those hands--so gentle.

I remember one time--as a young 18 year old girl, barely entering the fringes of adulthood--laying on his shoulder, his arm protectively around me. I saw this arm of a man, a real man. It wasn't the arm of a boy as I was used to, though I hadn't dated much. This arm had age to it--dark hair, muscle, wisdom somehow. And I stared at it, amazed. Amazed that this man was mine and I was practically a child.


He had a trans am that reflected his soul. The engine proclaimed its grandeur. The upholstery was pristine. It was loud and strong and invincible. He often drove to the dorm where we went to school together and picked me up. I proudly scooted in beside him--safe in that  car. Safe in his presence. Safe with my loud and strong and invincible man.

And then we married--he a man on fringes of his thirties with a sordid past; and me?  A young girl with adulthood on the horizon and a past inhabited in a glass box.

We roared together through those first few years--skirted the mountaintops of Colorado in the trans am. We laughed; we loved; we drank Dr. Pepper and iced tea; we held hands; we slept; we soared.

And now twenty five years have past. Who knew that this man that I was warned about by those wiser than me in years and education would become a part of my soul. He is woven into the fabric of my being in such a way that I no longer know where my life ends and his picks up. We move together like a powerful machine--able to read each others' moods by the subtle shift of the eyes, by the drooping shoulders; by the lilt of the voice. We have unspoken roles in our world, but sometimes those roles merge and diverge and merge again. And yet its seamless.

We have three children now--a dog, two cats, an aquarium of fish. We have a living room filled with furniture; bedrooms that reflect lives of children that are growing up and creating lives of their own. We have dusty pictures that hang on the wall and display memories of yesteryear. We have a kitchen that houses recipes that have become family favorites. We have a closet that is home to scrapbooks and homemade crafts that my children made in their early elementary years. We have a van and yet another trans am that, though not quite as glorious as the one that went before it, is beautiful in its own rite. And we have a garage filled with remote control airplanes and tools and scissors and drawers and organization and all kinds of things that this man of mine likes to piddle with in his spare time.

And now? This man whom I adore is in his fifties. Sometimes at night I head upstairs and see him in his chair, the tv blasting, his feet kicked up, and he is fast asleep. And sometimes I find him in that same chair with the glasses hovering on the tip of his nose as he peers at a magazine and, squinting, tries to read the words before him.

Age has crept in. It has stolen his that part of him that used to sing from the rooftops that he would never cease to be anything short of amazing and beautiful and strong.

But sometimes, in the quiet of the night, I look over at him sleeping. I see those arms--those arms of a man that are still strong and beautiful and wise. I see his eyes that still speak love when they look into mine. And I see a man who, after all these years, is still my best friend, is still the love of my life.

And to me? He will always be invincible. He will always be strong. He will always be nothing short of amazing.

And I am so glad, so very very glad, that of all the women in the world....he chose me to soar with  over the mountains of eternity.