Over the weekend, Mr. Geeky and I celebrated our twelfth anniversary. We had a yard sale and then we went out for dinner. We were pretty exhausted by all the work from the yard sale, so we kept our evening out pretty low key. We stayed local, having dinner, then drove to another restaurant for coffee and dessert and then hit a bookstore. While we were having coffee, we realized we were the oldest people in the place by about 20 years. I said to Mr. Geeky, don’t people our age go out? I mean, it’s only 8:30. We decided that many probably trek into the city to more adventurous places. We would have been that adventurous if we hadn’t been so tired. We started talking about other places we’d lived and realized that in those places, though there had been some “strictly college” joints, the coffee bars and eccentric spots had always been decidedly a mixed bag of college students, grad students, faculty, and townspeople. And that’s what made them so interesting and fun to hang out in. There is no place like that out here in the burbs that we know of. That’s a real shame because not everyone wants to trek to the city every weekend just to grab a cup of coffee.
Oddly, I didn’t really feel particularly old among the college students, though I certainly felt a bit out of place, listening to them discuss the classes they were taking, how many hours they were working, the people they hadn’t seen yet since school started and oh, by the way, is Jim still dating Lisa? It’s hard to believe that Mr. Geeky and I weren’t much older than them when we met. I had just graduated from college. He was a few years into grad school. We weren’t sure when we began this whole adventure where it would lead to. Where once, we wouldn’t have blinked at being among 18-22 year olds, we now sat listening to them bemusedly, thinking back to our own younger years and realizing that it wouldn’t be long before we’d be the parents of a kid this age. Who knew twelve years ago that this is where it would lead? And who knows what the next twelve years will bring? Isn’t that the joy of spending a life with someone?
