The Long Love

 I’ve talked a little bit here and there about our fall trip to Vienna, Austria, but as of last Tuesday, the trip is real: we bought our airline tickets! The airplane takes off in four months, but I’m already floating on air.

 It seems incredible that we will live in Vienna for four weeks; perhaps what I should really be amazed by is that Michael and I will celebrate 50 years of marriage this year. Most people will agree that marriage isn’t easy. Even when the love is true and deep, the realities of daily life can be erosive.

Bad things happen to people, and when you share a life with another person, there are more opportunities for bad things to happen. Add in a couple of children and the bad-things-happen index seems to rise exponentially. Some of the bad things are manageable—job loss, broken limbs, non-fatal car accidents—but we’ve had some bad luck that practically sucked the marrow out of our bones.

 I’d have to say my illness, which was finally diagnosed as lupus in 1989, was the gigantic bad thing for us. It forced me out of my career in telecommunications, which I happened to love, and which also provided our family’s insurance and lifestyle support. Michael had to take on complete responsibility for supporting us, which would have been enough of a burden in a society where you need two working people to get ahead. But because I was often incapacitated, he also had to run the household, manage the children, and take care of me.

 Wow. Sometimes it surprises me that he didn’t bolt. We both had had short, bad first marriages and neither of us wanted a repeat divorce. When we married, we made this vow: Homicide, suicide, or natural causes, the only way out is a pine box. Later we added: If you leave, you have to take the children.

 Do I think our vow is what made Michael hang in there when times were so difficult for us that we had to downsize our house and tighten our belts considerably? Probably not. I think he just loved me that much. (But when I browbeat him into adopting a toddler with me a few years later, the vow definitely was in play.)

 All the children survived and thrived, each in their own way. A decade or so ago, Michael had cancer—two different times, two different kinds—and I took care of him. It balances out if you hang in long enough. I’ve read recently about the phenomenon of gray divorce: old people leaving long marriages. I hear that Covid caused a lot of the trouble because couples, forced to spend so much time together, found out how unhappy they were.

 We are blessed in that regard. We enjoy many of the same things, like ballet and theater and art, and we find the same things funny. We like to spend time together, but we’re not joined at the hip. We support each other’s interests and hobbies. Maybe it’s not so surprising that our marriage is in its 50^th year.

 Early in our dating relationship, a strange thing happened. Michael was riding in the car with me, cracking jokes and fiddling with my radio station—major no-no, people—and I blurted out a sentence that I couldn’t explain then and I can’t explain now. I said, “I can’t believe I married such a turkey.”

 Boy, was that a conversation stopper. I had known him less than a month. I couldn’t believe I said it and, as he reported when we finally discussed it years later, he couldn’t either. Neither one of us acknowledged what I said. I gripped the steering wheel and drove. He made a comment along the lines of “How about them Cardinals?” (We lived in St. Louis back then.) The tension faded, but, thankfully, the relationship did not.

 Sometimes we say that we’ve been together over the centuries, sharing past lives. We are so simpatico that it feels like we’ve put in a lot of time learning how to balance in a marriage. Metaphysical, I know, but why not? I’m happy to think that we’ll find each other again in some distant time and place. Maybe we’ll get another 50 years out of it!

 Who’s in your life that you would like to be reincarnated with?

Dancing in Vienna

 We’re going to the ballet! “So what?” you ask. “You go to the ballet all the time.” Here’s so what—this time we’re going to the ballet in Vienna, Austria. A few hours ago I purchased tickets to the Vienna State Ballet for Michael and me on October 27. I am over the moon.

 I haven’t mentioned the trip to Vienna since last October, when we booked it, but now it’s less than six months away and it is becoming more real than fantasy. The trip is one of many offered by The Good Life Abroad (TGLA). They provide comfortable apartments in European cities to cohorts of participants for one month stays. Each city has a coordinator who arranges a few activities each week, but people are mostly on their own.

 The reason for this astonishing trip is our upcoming 50^th wedding anniversary. We toyed with many ideas about how to celebrate. Some of them included our kids and grandkids—reunion at a resort, cruise, destination vacation—but we ultimately decided that what we truly wanted was a world class experience for ourselves. Sorry kids!

 We wanted to go to Prague—a beautiful city with an acclaimed ballet. (Our celebration had to be ballet-centric because that’s who we are.) Even though it was a whole year away, we discovered that October 2026 had already sold out. Suddenly it felt imperative to book our trip without delay. Vienna was our second choice, and we jumped on it immediately. Michael and I grinned at each other as I clicked to confirm. And yes—we still have side trips to ballet hotspots Prague and Stuttgart firmly in our sights.

 We couldn’t actually buy tickets at any of these venues at the time, though. None of them would release their fall offerings until spring. Research had told me that tickets sold out early and I had no idea how one bought a ticket to a performance on another continent in another language and another currency anyway. I’ve been stay-up-at-night worried about the ballet tickets since last October.

 I did alleviate a little anxiety by putting Copilot to work monitoring the season announcements for all three companies. Last week, it alerted me that Vienna would open fall ticket sales today. How, I asked, do I buy these tickets? It told me I could buy tickets online if I opened an account on the Vienna State Opera website. Oh, and here’s a tip: select English language and the whole process translates automatically.

 The whole process turned out to be so easy that I’m embarrassed by my months of fretting. Chalk one up for modern technology. Prague and Stuttgart still haven’t announced their fall performances, so we got our Vienna tickets for a weeknight to keep weekends open. We hope to see dancers in the other cities, too. Copilot is monitoring announcements for me.

 There’s more to our trip than ballet, of course. Vienna is so rich in history, architecture, music, and literature that I think we’ll risk exhaustion if we aren’t careful with our time. And TGLA provides enrichment through their city coordinator program.

 Every Tuesday, there will be a group lunch. Believe it or not, we’ve been promised schnitzel in a Michelin-starred restaurant! Every Wednesday, there will be a group excursion. Every Thursday, there will be a group happy hour. All of these events are included in our trip fees. We can skip things, of course, but it’s hard to imagine why we would want to.

 The rest of the time, we fend for ourselves and, I’ll admit, this is a little bit daunting. I’ve been playing around on Duolingo, but I definitely don’t speak German. This worries me, although our German friend Bruno tells us that English is widely spoken in Europe—it’s a school requirement from a young age—so we probably won’t starve or get too lost. I hope.

 Planning this trip reminds me how rarely we let our imaginations go wild. And how much joy there is in it. What is your dream destination? Who would you go with? How long would you stay? Remember, it’s a dream, so no limits!!

Ciao