57 years

 

57 years of marriage is worth celebrating and we have!  We had a family dinner at Ocean Grove last weekend which I wrote about last week.  Last night we made the very short trip to Ruth's Chris for their happy hour, a day early for celebrating but happy hour does not occur on the weekend. We found a table easily and ordered sandwiches and wine at reasonable prices for Ruth's Chris at least.  When the waitress asked if we wanted to see the dessert menu, we thought Why not?  It's our anniversary.  We settled on the bread pudding and wondered why it was taking so long to come.  Probably it was because they wrote Happy Anniversary on the plate.  We asked the waitress to take a photo of the two of us--as we have not mastered the art of taking selfies.  

Then today we bought an ice cream cake at McCaffrey's and enjoyed a celebratory dessert after an ordinary but tasty meal of chicken thighs and vegetables.  Jeff and Susan stopped by this afternoon with a gift--a framed photo of the 18 of us as seen on the last blog post.  

We wrote notes to each other as we often do on special occasions and I treasure those notes.We did the NYT Spelling Bee and the NYT crossword puzzle as we do daily.  Although today, we struggled to get to "genius" on the spelling bee but finally after a second try and using hints this afternoon, we succeeded.

It was so long ago that we said our vows at the 12th Avenue Christian Reformed Church in Jenison, Michigan.  We spent our first night of marriage at our second floor apartment on Humboldt Street in Grand Rapids, Michigan and then left for a week long honeymoon to Montreal and Expo 67 and upstate New York.  We could never have imagined that 57 years later we would be Grandpa and Grandma VanderKam and would see our family grow to 18 of us.  We are grateful.  At our 30th anniversary, Jim toasted us saying "To 30 more years."  I hope and pray we make it to that--and beyond--in good health and enjoying each other's company.