We'll be leaving in a few minutes to travel to the VA hospital to see Dr. Damn Meanie. CC has a long list of things he wants to accomplish while there.  He is on a roll downstairs complaining about my chaotic messes.  "All I do is clackety, clack on the computer, but I can't do anything real like clean up."

 It would be easy to get into it with him this morning. He has somewhere to go and everything is in his way. He hurls invectives at me and physical objects to far corners where it might be months before I lay eyes on these things again.

 I am going to the VA as support - an extra set of legs who has grown used to the terrain and knows how to get from one place to another and who to see when I get there. CC has been personally training me for over a year and a half to do this job.

 I hate taking care of his business because I am most likely to become a target of his frustrations as he weathers difficult locomotion and terrible daily arthritis.

 Now, "all the goddamned apples are fucking gone."  I fed him the last one yesterday. I won't say CC doesn't have some legitimate complaints about me. The apple isn't one though.

Our marriage is like barbed wire. At regular intervals the barbs are there, catching and ripping the fabric of our daily lives. But neither of us quit each other. We keep on despite the barrage of cussing, the messes, the incompatibilities that crop up.  We have something larger than all of that.

We have each other. We have a family. A shared history. Children and grandchildren. We pick each other up, we defend each other, we sleep side by side taking comfort in the warm snoring person who dreams beside us.

We made a commitment to each other and perservance in the face of such a covenant brings good fortune.