Please note this email was first published October 7, 2003.  Since that time, my husband and I have been married longer, lived wiser, and loved a bunch more.  In fact, this year we will have been married thirty years.  Sherwood still uses the wrong word once in a while, and I still have a lot of baggage—also shoes.  

Happy Valentine’s Day,

    “Bang!  Bang! I got you,” the little boy said to my husband.
  
    Sherwood said, “You can’t kill me.  I’m indispensable.”

    I told my husband that what I thought he meant to say was indestructible.  He laughed. Sometimes being married to Sherwood Zern is like being married to the famous Yogi Berra, who once said, “It’s Deja Vu, all over again.” 

    We have been married for twenty-five years on the twenty-first of October.  I hope that I got that date right.  Sherwood is the one that’s good with anniversary dates and numbers.  I’m the one that’s good with words;  well, at least I know a lot of words.  So, I’d like to share a Zern family parable with you.  It’s called The Zern Family Parable of the Baggage.  It has a lot of words in it— also a  video for the 21st century:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nTwTF8kxS8k
  (Oops is that the silly video link again?????)

    I love shoes.  I love cheap shoes from Payless.  When Payless shoe store has their end of the season BOGO (buy one, get one half price) shoe sale, I am a happy girl.  My philosophy is, “Why buy one pair of fifty dollar shoes, when you can buy ten pair of five dollar shoes?”

    When my husband and I travel I enjoy taking a lot of cheap shoes with me.  Often, I will pack one entire suitcase with nothing but cheap shoes from Payless.  This drives my husband of twenty-five years crazy.  He always tells me that if I insist on taking all those shoes he IS NOT  going to carry that shoe bag.  Inevitably, he will say, “Don’t pack that bag, Linda.  I’m not going to carry it.”  But no matter how hard I try, I always wind up with a bag stuffed full of shoes.

    When we get to the airport and open the trunk of the car, that shoe bag lays there like a lump of Christmas coal between us.  I smile at him.  He smiles at me.  And inevitably that good man, my husband, reaches in, picks up that bag of shoes—and carries it.

    This parable is not about shoes, shopping, luggage, or traveling, but it is about baggage.  I have a lot of baggage.  I have had it a long time.  My husband would be very happy for me to put some of it down.  It’s not that I don’t want to;  it’s just that some baggage is pretty tough to put down, because it’s all you’ve got to remember your life by.

    My husband would rather not have had to carry my extra baggage all these years, but he always does.  He always has.  The truth of it is that I’m pretty sure that I couldn’t have gotten anywhere without him.

    Come to think of it, he is pretty indispensable.

        Happy, happy day of true love,

        Linda L. Zern
 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nTwTF8kxS8k
 

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