Twenty

Let it be known this day that the authors have been married (yes, to each other) for 20 years! We celebrated our anniversary on the 10th of October.

The two decades we have spent since going legit have ben marked by the onset of one serious illness after another. Pattie has had most of the ill health, but Carl has paid a price by having had to play caregiver and has attracted enough medical misfortune himself to be called "disabled" as well. But one thing that has endured during that time has been our marriage itself. The achievement is not trivial: the declining health of one spouse or the other is a common reason cited by former spouses for the dissolution of their marriages. To remain married in this, the Post-Nineties culture, has come to carry a whiff of the bucolic bourgeoisie, a hick value that the perfect-portfolio crowd eschews. But the authors have no fear of making our position public when we say that however many shocks we have taken to the body, and in all the other ways that society still plays "Kick the Cripple" in a literal sense, they haven't managed to divide and conquer us. We are still near and dear.