Happy anniversary, Kyle and Peggy.

43 years ago my parents married. A few hours after the simple ceremony, my military pilot father flew to Cuba, entrusting my mother to the care of her parents until he returned. Instead of complying with everyone else's wishes, my newly-wedded mother took the family dog (which, although a female, had been named for her high school sweetheart), rented an apartment, and immediately set up her independent household. She bought furniture. The dog disappeared. My grandmother was the one who found Bo, Jr.; she was sitting, waiting on the corner in front of a house the family had lived in years before, just blocks away from the apartment where my mother was settling. In four months my father returned safely from Cuba. He and my mother didn't live happily ever after, but they loved and they lived until they died and somewhere in there they made me. Sometimes I miss them so terribly, like the missing is brand new--a fresh deep cut, not a still-tender decades-old stripe that tries to erase itself in vain.

I believe they are happy and busy. And together. I imagine them celebrating their anniversary in many joyful ways they were unable to here. I hope they know I'm thinking of them with love and gratitude and understanding. And I can't help but make a selfish wish and hope that they're proud of who they made.