Date Night

Friday, September 10, 2010 marked a milestone. It was the day I had the best date of my life. We had fun, we laughed and we went home thinking that we would grow old together. But to get to this point, it took my Aletha and me about 22 years.

We have never taken our one-on-one time seriously. We enjoy spending time together with McKenzie as a family. The problem is, that left little time for me to enjoy just Aletha’s company. Even though McKenzie is 10 years old, I can count on my fingers and toes the number of times Aletha and I have been out alone on a date.

When we came to China, it got even worse. McKenzie had no friends here and we knew no adults we would trust to watch our child for the evening. 10 months into our stay in China, McKenzie got invited to spend the night with a friend. We jumped on the opportunity to spend an evening together.

Lucky for us, there are many restaurants within five minutes of our apartment. We chose one that I had eaten at alone while McKenzie and Aletha were in the US, The Blue Marlin. The main draw was that a live band started playing at eight o'clock whereas most restaurants did not start until nine. And you know us old-timers need our sleep, so this made all the difference in the world.

Aletha put on a new dress that she had custom-made here in China. The dress fit like a glove and had a very unique collar line. She even wore my favorite earrings. Once again, I would walk in beside the prettiest woman in the room.

From the time we sat down, I felt things were different. We were acting like two silly teenagers on vacation. We laughed, smiled and took pictures of ourselves with our pocket camera. I'm sure everyone in the room thought that we had only been in Shanghai a few days.

I can't remember the last time when my sense of humor had such an effect on her. Tonight every joke I told harvested a giggle out of her. She sat next to me and insisted we take pictures together. In every picture, we either smiled naturally or pulled off some silly looking face.

When the music started we took turns trying to sing with it or dance to it. Mind you, we never left our chairs, but that did not stop us from embarrassing each other. For the two hours we where there, it felt like we were the only people in the room.


When we left for the night, everything that had ever bothered us before seemed to melt away. I stopped thinking about all the bad things in my life, and I only focused on how much fun I was having.

It seemed that I had forgotten how to have fun with my wife. We spend so much time together dealing with all the stress and issues and we forget to just love each other. It has taken me 22 years of dating to figure this out, and I do not want to go 22 seconds having forgotten this again.



Aletha,

You are my favorite and my only. Thank you for the wonderful night. I hope I never forget again that we are supposed to have fun together.


Love Always,
Jason