Happy Birthday, Richard

Richard, my husband, is seventy years old today.  He was 46 when we became a couple, and I have to say he has aged very well.  Physically, in fact, he is in some ways in much better shape because he has taken up exercise at the gym in the years since he retired, and, as he does with every project he takes seriously, he is unswerving in his adherence to the plan he has created for himself.  He even amuses our trainer, who started him with a regimen of exercises, when he notices Richard with clipboard in hand marking off the data after each maneuver on the machines.  There is no doubt Richard is  happy to be retired after forty years of secondary school teaching, yet to my mind--and he would deny this-- he has replaced it with the exercise.  He is a man made for projects; in the course of the two plus decades we have been together he has made a large deck off our house in Cambridge which is one of the few features that the buyer saved in his complete makeover of the place, and at Hull he took a 20' x 20' sand filled kiddie area, added gravel, leveled the whole thing, and paved it with brick, and then erected a pergola on which we planted wisteria.  Ten years later his construction has not shifted nor sunk, and the shade produces a temperature markedly lower than the surrounding garden. He made his life a project from the beginning, getting from Staten Island on the ferry, on the subway up to City College realizing no body's dream but his own.  Then for forty years teaching at one high end school whether public or  private until he ended as the czar of all language instruction in the Wellesley Public Schools.  With all his languages we are always in Italy, France, or Germany!  Indeed, some of our happier moments have been traveling together in the real Italy, where in fact came one of my early revelations of this darling creature.  For a trip to Italy he decided to learn a little Italian, and in a month he spoke comfortably in whole sentences! By August when we went back to visit friends  they, with whom I had been speaking in my broken Italian for thirty years, were more often deep in conversation with Richard whom they would then ask to translate what they were saying for me! Me, the great speaker of Italian!  Still he was so glamorous speaking Italian who would not forgive him.  He was glamorous and flirtatious when I met him, and the years have not tarnished his luster. Two people growing old and older, the biggest challenge is spending so much more time together.  I was born to make conversation, along with giving lectures as a professional.  The two tendencies are devastating for someone to experience who is precise, of few words, and--ironic for someone in the language business-- not given to use language as a bonding mechanism. I must say he handles the potentials for boredom rather well, mainly by going into his room and taking up whatever text he is currently studying.  Whatever else, the old darling is always there for me, taking in stride my increasing slowness and frailty.  And, god bless him, he has taken up cooking and gardening, as my capacity to do both seems to diminish.  I cooked his dinner for twenty odd years, but now we live mostly on the delicious fish dinners that he, and he alone, knows how to turn out.  How odd it is to look back through the years at this handsome, vivacious man, and see him transformed into the ideal companion, the steady presence, the unremarkable phenomenon that adorns the room.  Le voilá that is my darling Richard at seventy, and of course seventy is the new forty.