Stan! Here for a Year!

You read that right.

I sent an email to my pal Stan last night, which was part "Hey, how ya doin'? Just touchin' base!" and part "Where's my money?" He replied this morning, and one thing that he mentioned was that he'd been living here in Southern California for a year already.

That got me thinking, because hell if I realized that it had been that long since he'd moved down here. After doing the math, though, I realized that he was right.

You see, it was a somewhat stormy time of the year, and my son Stephen had been with us for about a week since his birth. Stan had driven down to SoCal from Seattle, and I remember him coming by our apartment that evening to say hello and meet our newborn child.

That memory drove it home for me. The most important benchmark in my life up until now was Stephen's birth on March 21st, 2005. We celebrated his first birthday in style, but that celebration didn't remind me of the other benchmarks -- some small, some large -- that I'd put out of my mind in my day to day life as a dad, a husband, a writer, and a buyer.

So, like...wow.

There's another important benchmark on the horizon, which recalls another of my most important days: my wedding anniversary. Next Tuesday, Amy and I will celebrate our fifth year as wife and husband. Previous to that, we'd been together (in sin) since we met in July of 1992. All told, that's fourteen years.

Just consider how many little Stephens we could have running around right now, if we'd been so inclined.