Katie and I celebrated our fifth year of wedded bliss last Saturday. We the assistance of my wonderful MiL we went to see Superbad and then had dinner at McCormick & Schmicks. Superbad was pretty hilarious, the dinner just made us slightly ill.

Five years ago KT and I lived in Flagstaff, Arizona and decided to get married in Kansas City. Now, we live less than two miles away from the place we got married, and celebrated our anniversary just blocks away. I was talking to my Dad the other day and he hadn’t realzed that KT and I dated in High School in Urbana, Illinois for a bit, when she was a freshman and I was a sophomore. She moved away to Lac Cruces, New Mexico and had a somewhat short relationship until I got tired of not having her near. In that short time though we racked up mighty long distance bills, back when there was such a thing, and since there really wasn’t email yet, I wrote her 30 page letters, yes, by hand, sharing everything my short life had to share. And lots and lots of song lyrics. I remember being so smitten that I couldn’t eat for two weeks after our first kiss in the closet at Katie Ducey’s house. I remember closing the door in the closet and she reached in her pocket and I asked me if I wanted a screw. She of course then handed me a phillips head screw. Silly kids. So that would have been about 15 years ago.

Katie moved back to Illinois and we finished high school together, but never hung out as we had diverged in social taste by that point. Sometime around my 21st birthday in I found KT again working at Strawberry Fields with a good friend of mine. So I asked her out on a date. Things get a little muddy in my head at this point because we drank a lot of wine on those early dates, but I think we kissed on our first date of round two dating in the arboretum at the University of Illinois. I think we were pretty much inseparable from that point until I left for school in Flagstaff, where I hung out playing video games and skipping class and generally being lonely until KT joined me a year later. Fewer letters during that period since we were both in school and busy and our parent couldn’t tell us to get off the phone.

Flagstaff was a fun place for a young couple and we did a lot of hiking and hanging out with friends and participated in a lot of general goofery. I think we really found out a lot about each other there, separated from other family and our collective history. It’s a great relationship test actually, to find out if you still want to be with the same person after essentially starting fresh. I know that I do, it seems as if KT has resigned herself to the same fate. So five years ago we drove out new car to Kansas City and got married, then drove back and napped for a couple hours before hopping on a plane to Hawaii where we enjoyed the sun and the sand. There’s a lot of story hidden in this paragraph that will have to wait for another post.

So on Saturday we went to see Superbad and after we decided to go to Latte Land and blow some money on a tasty coffee drink. Standing in line I held KT’s hand as I often do and looked into her eyes and said, “Hi pretty”. The gentleman in the pink shirt and tan cap in front of us turned and looked at me and said, “Oh, hi!”. We can all be pretty I guess, but KT is the only pretty one for me. Happy late anniversary sugar!