Twenty-Six!

Roary Guards the Years

Today is Jim and my twenty-sixth wedding anniversary.  Not too bad for what was for both of us a later-in-life marriage.

Depending on the weather, we’ll either go wander around the zoo, or go out somewhere indoors and look at things.  Jim has a very associational memory, and the best way to get him telling stories is go somewhere and see what we can see, then discover what it brings up out of the depths.

And we’ll probably eat out.  Japanese, I think.  A few years ago, Jim asked a friend who’d lived in Japan where we could go to get authentic, rather than Americanized, Japanese food here in Albuquerque.  Turns out there are a couple of good places, and so a repeat performance seems in order.

Just the other day, someone asked how Jim and I met.  The answer is simultaneously very simple, and somewhat complicated.

We met through the shared hobby of role-playing games.  That’s the simple.

The complex is as follows…  When I moved to New Mexico to live with Roger Zelazny, I told Roger that the one thing I really missed from my old life was gaming.  He said, “George has a group.  I’ll ask him if he knows if anyone is looking for players.”  And that’s how we came to join the group that Jim played with.  (Which, in case you wonder, is also the group that spawned Wild Cards.)

After Roger died, the members of that group were amazingly supportive, up to and including helping me move from Santa Fe to Albuquerque.  In the course of that move, the door of the cabinet in which I kept the TV swung wild and got broken.  Jim felt bad about that, because he’d failed to stop the accident in time, and offered to come over to fix it.

He did, and I offered to make him dinner as a thank you.  When Jim left, I realized that his was the first visit since Roger’s death where I didn’t suddenly get overwhelmed.  We almost more drifted into dating than making a deliberate choice.  I’ll admit, as much as I liked Jim, I had a lot of healing to do, so it was good that he had a field project that took him out of town most of the week.

But one thing was certain, he remained, and remains, the only person who has become part of my privacy.  I’m glad, and I am incredibly grateful as well.

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