I said nothing. The only sound was of Sal lighting another cigarette.

“So you guys going to make it? To fifty?”

“Well,” I said, exhaling with her, “we’re going to do our best.”

After hanging up, I checked the kitchen clock. It was almost midnight. As I suspected, during my conversation with Sal, Kate had fallen asleep while reading Jane Eyre. Before turning off the lamp on her side, I studied her sleeping face. Her sweet features. The faint wrinkles around her mouth from smiling too much. The slight upturn of her near-perfect nose.

How will we be after fifty years?

Sleep was difficult for me that night. I took a bowl of Raisin Bran to the living room/dining room/toy room, turned on the TV, and channel-surfed. Finally, in desperate need for perspective, I returned to the kitchen. Because we’d married at a younger age than most of our friends—I had been twenty-three and Kate twenty-five—fifty years of marriage seemed a possibility. For me, it was a goal.

Yes, I had dueling fantasies: a golden-anniversary celebration with my would-be-seventy-five-year-old wife and the dream of a wild weekend with Anna Brody. But honestly, a weekend with Anna Brody seemed far from the realm of possibility, which made doing the math that night, at our jelly-stained kitchen table and without the aid of a calculator, all the more harmless. What if I had it both ways? Fifty years of marriage to Kate, one weekend with Anna Brody. What would it mean?

Listed below are my preliminary findings.

Over a fifty-year period, I will have shared the following . . .

2,600 weekends:
1 weekend (Anna)—2,599 weekends (Kate)
18,250 days:
2 days (Anna)—18,248 days (Kate)
438,000 hours:
48 hours (Anna)—437,952 hours (Kate)
26,280,000 minutes:
2,880 minutes (Anna)—26,277,120 minutes (Kate)
1,576,800,000 seconds:
172,800 seconds (Anna)—1,576,627,200 seconds (Kate)

Viewing it from a purely numerical standpoint, the weekend seemed like not such a big deal. Barely a blip. But I’ve never been one to trust numbers. That was how I found myself back in church.

On the first Sunday in February, I arrived early because I needed extra time to pray. Attendance would be down, I heard one bald usher tell another, because it was Super Bowl Sunday. In addition to my primary reason for needing church, I had other concerns. First, there was a letter from Dr. Jamison Lamson, my mentor and dissertation adviser, telling me of his impending retirement and of his “regret” that my work was the only piece of “unfinished business” in his long and distinguished career. The second area of concern was ABC’s post-Super Bowl airing of the family-friendly An Angel and His Wings series, starring Jeff Slade, that Kate had been threatening to watch along with an estimated forty million other viewers.

But no, that morning I stayed, as they say, on topic.