Enduring Works & Wedding Anniversaries
Hello and good day!
Here is a very strange thing to try to get your head around.
Dinosaurs were on Earth for roughly 165 million years.
They would have kept right on existing too, if an asteroid hadn't crashed into the planet and kicked up a gigantic cloud of dust, which blocked the sun and killed off most of the edible plant life.
As an aside, I am only parroting here what I remember from elementary school.
I have no idea how scientists came up with these numbers, and I can in no way, shape, or form offer an opinion as to their veracity.
I can, however, confirm that a Google search matched my recollection fairly accurately.
I can also admit that in fields where I have no expertise, I am perfectly willing to accept the commonly held expert view as a prevailing fact.
Arrayed up against the notion that dinosaurs roamed the earth for 165 million years, is the absolutely verifiable datum that I am celebrating my 20th wedding anniversary today.
Good times are joyous, but fleeting.
And now all of it, 20 years of married life, good, bad, or otherwise, is gone forever.
Only the present and the future remain to be experienced.
It has been a good twenty years.
My wife has been a good wife. I've tried my best to be a good husband.
We've spent 16 of the 20 years building a chocolate business.
The business is an ongoing adventure.
We've spent 12 of the 20 years raising three sons.
This is a work in progress as well.
We bought a home 8 years ago, a fixer upper in terrible condition, but in a good neighborhood. We got the house on the cheap because of the truly awful shape that it was in.
The first night in our place, my wife stepped into the shower. It was an old and raggedy shower up on the second floor that didn't have proper framing underneath it.
The weight of my wife's was enough to send a hairline fracture down the entire length of the tub.
I was downstairs unpacking boxes when a torrent of water came gushing from a ceiling vent. The water soaked me clean through.
My wife didn't realize that she had sprung a leak and that everything underneath her was flooding. I called up to her, but she couldn't hear me over the sound of running shower water.
Finally, I ran into the bathroom like a mad man.
"Turn off the shower! Turn off the shower!" I yelled.
"Why!" she yelled back.
"Everything is flooding downstairs! Hurry!"
She cut the shower and dried the soap off her body, and the shampoo out of her hair, without rinsing.
We found the moving box with our towels in it and dried up the puddling.
I made a late-night run to Home Depot to buy waterproof boating epoxy.
We showered with a long epoxy patch covering the crack in our tub for several years, until we saved up enough money to redo the shower.
We gave our boys about a million baths in that tub too.
Nery is pretty good with construction and carpentry, and she has been fixing up our house little by little over the years.
We have ourselves a nice little fenced in fruit garden out back, double pained insulated windows throughout, and a fresh coat of paint in most of the rooms.
I'm going to brusquely change topics on you now, and then double back to tie this whole thing up.
One of my hobbies over the years has been reading treatises on economics.
There is a concept in economics that I've always liked. Stated succinctly, the concept is that capital is conservative.
In this context, capital doesn't mean money, like investment capital.
Capital in this case means tools, machines, and infrastructure.
Durable goods.
When you look around at what humanity has built up, you are mostly looking at relics from the past.
Most of the roads that we drive on were built decades ago.
My house was built in 1968.
We founded our chocolate company in 2008.
The genetic variety of cacao that we use in our chocolate has been around for hundreds of thousands or millions of years.
Dinosaurs went extinct 65 million years ago, but we know about them, and can speculate as to how long they lived, based on the fossils that have survived.
In Cusco, you can see new houses built on top of Incan masonry originally constructed 800 years ago.
Capital is conservative. What we build lasts.
Memories exist in a fuzzy nether world.
Works carry on.
My most prized possession is a book of letters that my Great Aunt Opal left for me.
Opal was my dad's aunt.
From age 95 to age 97 she wrote me a letter every two weeks about her life and our family history. She didn't send me the letters though.
Rather, she put the letters in a book and left the book for me in her will.
I received the book after she passed away.
Because of that book, I know about Opal and her life and what my dad was like when he was a little boy.
If the book survives, I will leave it to my kids, and if my kids take care of it, their kids might know about Opal too.
Opal and her life lessons might be known throughout time because of the work she left behind.
There are certain times in your life that lend themselves to reflecting on what it all means and what really matters.
A 20th wedding anniversary is one of those times.
On this day, I am most proud of what I've been able to build with my wife.
A loving marriage.
A family.
A business.
A home.
My desire for the next 20 years is to add even more to this world that will remain long after I am gone.
I want to get in as much as I can before time slips away from me for good.
And I hope that you too will create works that endure.
Thank you so much for your time today.
I hope that you have a truly blessed day!
Adam
Click here for wonderful chocolate made with pure Nacional cacao.