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The Same, Day After Day

The Same, Day After Day

Hiram, my husband, had a birthday last Sunday. He’s fifty-three, as I will be in a few months. We’ve reached that age where people look at our wedding pictures and say things like, “Wow, Hiram, you had a lot of hair!” or “Jolene, you were so…young,” or some other exclamation that requires the speaker remove a foot from the mouth.

Our trip to California was his birthday present and he says it was a great one. We’ve been married for thirty-one years, so I could have predicted the reasons he enjoyed himself: jogging on the beach every morning, listening to the stories the elderly relative on my side of the family told, fixing a kitchen drawer for the same relative, and the engrossing tour of the Midway, a retired aircraft carrier. In fact when I couldn’t find him on the carrier, I knew right where to look. He was front and center at the “Ejection Seat Theater,” captivated by both the movie and his ejection seat.

In all the important ways, Hiram hasn’t changed at all. And when I look at his college pictures – with all his sun-blond hair and without glasses – I see him as he was then and as he is now. I have no words to explain how the passage of time has changed him (and me) without changing us at all. But one of my favorite authors, Marilynne Robinson, says it perfectly in her new novel, Home.

The main character, Glory, describes her elderly father and his lifelong friend as they tell old stories and play checkers. “The joke seemed to be that once they were very young and now they were very old, and that they had been the same day after day and were somehow at the end of it all so utter changed.”

Robinson’s words describe Hiram, a man of few words, so beautifully. “…the same day after day and…somehow at the end of it all so utterly changed.” I can’t wait to finish her book or to watch my husband’s unchanging transformation during the rest of our lives together. Between the two of them, there will be words enough to keep me happy for a long time.