Dog Tags, Chinese Food and Valentine's Day

One night forty three years ago, two scared kids a long way from home shared a meal of Chinese food on the bed of a cheap motel just a few blocks off the Bay Bridge in Oakland, California.  The next day, the girl, who was very pregnant, would fly home to Oklahoma. She had stayed in California as long as she could to be near her sailor husband but now had to go home before the airlines would no longer allow her to fly.  The sailor was just about to finish tech school at Treasure Island and didn't know where in the world he would wind up next.  There was a war going on at the time and after school, a lot of sailors were ordered to just keep traveling west until they found the shooting.  It was a poignant night that neither of those kids ever forgot.

Tonight, to celebrate Valentine's day and remember another time in our lives, Sheila and I ate Chinese on the bed in a motel room.  It was a much better motel than we stayed in that night in 1969 and the menu was better was well.  We had good carryout Chinese, a thermos full of Sheila's favorite Fuzzy Navels, and a box of chocolates.  I even had dog tags for us to take the first bite with.  The first time, I was so nervous that I forgot the plastic utensils at the carryout place and we wound up eating the meal with my dog tags and our fingers.

Forty three years ago, I could never have imagined that this night I would be a mid sixty-ish lawyer and a partner in a new start up company.  And, I surely couldn't have imagined that Sheila would be a magna cum laude business school grad working as personal assistant to the guy that owns several of the buildings you see on the downtown Tulsa skyline.  In my plan, I was going to be an engineer and Sheila was going to have babies.  Life doesn't always give you what you plan but it has been a good ride.  There have been ups and downs but we're still together and somewhere deep down in our hearts we are still those same two kids.