This is my lovely wife, Bridget. Today is our 17th anniversary. Even though
we dated for three years before we got married, there are quite a few things
about her that I couldn’t have known when we said "I do" to each
other. In honor of those 17 years of on-the-job training, I thought would tell
you 17 things I’ve learned about my bride since our wedding day.
#1: There has never been a more talented baby-entertainer. She could make a
fortune touring the country entertaining the 2-and-under crowd.
#2: She is incapable of saying this phrase: "That’s good enough."
#3: She has an 80% chance of coming out of a clothing store without a
purchase, and when she does buy something, there’s an 80% chance she will
return it.
#4: She can be very funny off-the-cuff, but is completely unable to tell a
story or joke without messing up the punchline.
#5: She secretly wants to be a carpenter.
#6: She has two personalities: Regular Bridget and Party Bridget. Both of
them can be a lot of fun, but you won’t be able to keep up with one of them.
Trust me on this.
#7: When she says the checkbook is balanced, she’s not being approximate. If
you haven’t deposited a check she’s given you, she will hunt you down.
#8: Even though she was a cheerleader in high school, she will never ever do
one of her old routines again, and no amount of begging will change her mind.
#9: She is a genetically gifted dishwasher-loader. She could fit a mini-van
into that thing by twisting and turning it the right way.
#10: Don’t wake her up. Just don’t do it.
#11: If you like to listen to one radio station, don’t let her sit in the
front seat of the car with you. If you like to watch more than 30 seconds of a
television show, don’t let her touch the remote control.
#12: When she gives you her opinion you can rest assured she’s telling you
what she really thinks. Don’t ask if you don’t want to know.
#13: She has an unusually high tolerance for physical pain, but a commercial
can make her cry.
#14: If she has been somewhere once, she can find it again without
directions.
#15: When she tells kids what to do, they do it. Period. And not just her
own kids. All kids.
#16: She is very imaginative with her verb usage when driving behind someone
who doesn’t drive well. I’m pretty sure some of her suggestions for fellow
drivers aren’t physically possible.
#17: She has somehow managed to reverse the aging process. She looks as
beautiful today as she did the day I married her.
That was 17 wonderful years ago.
If I could go back in time to my wedding day and talk to that 28-year-old
groom nervously sweating through his tuxedo, I know exactly what I would tell
him: "Nothing to be nervous about, Rick. This is the best decision of your
life."
If Bridget could go back in time to our wedding day and talk to that
24-year-old bride, I know exactly what she would tell her: "Make him get
rid of the mullet. It’s going to ruin the wedding album forever."
June 16, 1976 was the date of the uprising in Soweto, South Africa. I got to visit the site of that uprising in 2010, and it had a profound influence on my life. This is the column I wrote about it after I returned.
I’ve always considered myself to be a food adventurer. My
motto is this: I will try anything once.
Of course, that’s a much easier motto to live by when I’m in the United States.
It really gets tested when I travel overseas. That’s where my palette has been challenged
with a whole host of “maybe I better not ask what’s in this” food adventures.
In the process I’ve discovered some incredible dishes, and I’ve identified a
few that will forever go on my “Do not order” list, but there was one meal that
affected me more than any other. It was a meal I ate when I was
in South Africa for the World Cup.
My siblings and I went there together, and though we went primarily
to see soccer games, we had our day-time hours free to explore. One day we decided
to check out Soweto, the heartbreakingly poor neighborhood in Johannesburg. We drove
by an endless array of three-to-five foot huts crammed side by side (each of which
housed entire families). We walked through the square where the anti-Apartheid
demonstrations took place a generation ago. And then, when we told him we were
hungry, our guide took us to a local one-room dining establishment.
The “restaurant” was serving lunch buffet style. None of the
food was labeled, and most of it was unidentifiable. There was one dish that
came in a shade of yellowish-green that I hadn’t really seen in food before. My
brother and I exchanged perplexed expressions, but we were careful not to
offend our hosts.
As I always do, I tried a little bit of everything. The
yellowish-green dish tasted a bit strong (lots of spices masking whatever the
main ingredient was), but I choked it down. I figured the beef dish would help
me get the taste out of my mouth, so I saved that for last. When I started
chewing it, I realized it wasn’t like any beef dish I had eaten before. The
texture was almost indescribable. It was
a bit rubbery, but that’s not quite it. It was softer than that. It was more like
a soggy brown chunk of un-chewable matter.
After one bite I knew I was in trouble. It was all I could
do to hold it down, but I forced a smile on my face after I swallowed it,
because our hosts were proudly watching us.
“Mmm, beef?” I asked.
The woman nodded.
“I wish I could eat more, but I’m absolutely stuffed.”
We effusively praised our hosts as we left the restaurant,
got back into our van, and headed back toward the hotel. As we were rumbling out of the neighborhood,
I saw a sight that will never leave my mind.
A man was standing under a tent. He was holding a gigantic butcher knife
in one hand, and swatting away flies with his other hand. On the table in front of him was a cow’s
head.
Just the head.
“What’s he doing?” my sister asked.
“He’s butchering the meat,” our guide told us. “This is the only kind of meat
we can afford here, and we are so lucky when we get it. The local butchers don’t
think it’s edible so they sell it to us for almost nothing, but as you know, it
is quite delicious if it’s prepared correctly.”
None of us said a word.
We knew we had just eaten cow’s brain, or eyes, or snout, but
that wasn’t at all what we were thinking about. Until that moment, we hadn’t
really grasped the reality of daily life in a place like this. We had heard
about extreme poverty, and we had seen it, but until our lunch in Soweto, we
had never tasted it.
That’s a meal you can’t possibly forget.
The Cubs-Sox game was
getting exciting when the groundskeeper ran out to the umpire and said that the
game had to be stopped immediately.
I thought to myself,
“Yeah sure, now that the Cubs are coming back, there’s some sort of a weather
emergency. Right.”
While the crew put the
tarp on the field, my wife called me from the backyard. “Will you come here and
help me for a second?”
When I went out to the
backyard, she was in the process of putting all of our deck furniture in the
garage. She told me that the neighbor said it was supposed to get pretty windy.
So, even though I thought she (and the Sox’s groundskeeper) were overreacting,
I helped get anything that could be blown away into the garage. The only thing
we left on the deck was a little kiddie picnic table that the boys never used
anymore.
“Boys, let’s go in the
basement,” Bridget said. “There’s a big storm coming.”
I went along with it,
but I have to admit, I thought she was going a little overboard.
No more than a minute or
two later we heard a loud boom that sounded like thunder, it suddenly got very
dark, and poof, the power went out. That was followed by the simultaneous
violent opening of our front and back door at the same time (both were closed
tight) and the unmistakable sound of a vicious storm raging outside.
Suddenly it didn’t seem
like such a bad idea to be in the basement.
A minute or two later it
was over.
I went upstairs to close
the back door when I saw the wreckage. Our neighbor’s old tree had been
decimated, huge limbs were scattered all over her backyard and our driveway.
The little table I left on the deck had been blown into the fence and smashed
to pieces.
When I went to close the
front door, I saw wreckage that was even more pronounced. Entire trees had been
uprooted, and were strewn across the street, making it impassible. Still other
trees landed on top of garages and houses, causing major damage. Patio
umbrellas were jammed into the ground like spears. The whole neighborhood was
outside. We couldn’t believe our eyes. Our street looked like it had been
bombed.
It wasn’t until the next
day that we discovered an actual tornado had touched down, and we had been
right in the path of it.
When I walked my dog
through the neighborhood over the next few days and saw the extent of the
damage, I couldn’t help but think that someone must have been watching out for
us. A tornado went right down our street and somehow nobody was hurt. Not one
person.
Our power finally
returned on Friday night. Our phone, cable, and internet came back on Saturday
night. The village tells us the tree limbs will be picked up by Monday.
And all we really lost
were a few tree limbs and a few hundred dollars worth of groceries.
I’ve never felt so lucky
in my life.
