The hubby is a couple of years older than I am. More than a couple, actually. The year that I was sentenced to sit in the No No Chair for talking too much in Miss Pat's kindergarten class he was a hotshot senior with a crew cut who lettered in basketball and danced with girls in poodle skirts (the girls were in poodle skirts). It was 1957 and the music was great and the world was headed in pretty much the right direction, by God. When I graduated from high school thirteen years later Buddy Holly and God were famously dead and Elvis had turned into a total jerk. So we come from different cultures, the old man and I. And it keeps life interesting when it's not destroying any possibility for human communication whatsoever.

Take the 50th Reunion of the Class of '57, for example. It's a small class - maybe 90 folks - from a mostly agricultural area in a little town called Seymour, WI. (Or as Jim's dad used to say - "see more, know less." He strongly suggested his offspring try their wings in bigger vistas.) For the occasion, they'd reserved the 14th floor terrace of a very groovy event center a stone's throw from the hallowed Lambeau Field in Green Bay. It's a venue that has hosted Rod Stewart and Cher in the recent past. The night of the event it was showcasing The Famous Lipizzaner Stallions of Austria. I had never heard of them before. But I could see why they might be famous in some circles. They were massive, elegant creatures who had had the bejeesus trained out of them so that they could execute weirdly unhorselike maneuvers. They could kick, for instance, like drum majorettes. And they could skip! Plus they were dramatically, breathtakingly, pure white!

The hors d'oeuvres were equally impressive. Every fabulous little party morsel was there: grilled shrimp wrapped in prosciutto, stuffed mushrooms, deviled eggs, fresh fruit, spanakopita, and more, PLUS the piece de resistance, individual beef wellingtons! It was shaping up to be a very swell evening indeed with the stallions and the baby wellies and the beauty of the terrace in early evening.

But I sensed Jim was not in the happy place I was. As class president he'd been asked to prepare a few remarks and I knew he was frantically scanning his hard drive for useful data - nicknames, funny stories, wry observations on life between then and now. A hurried half hour spent rifling through the the 1956 and 1957 Ripper yearbooks had seeded some ideas but they were perilously fragmented and jotted in only the sketchiest fashion on a little hardware store tablet tucked into his shirt pocket. With some amusement he had noted that the class motto "One Step At A Time. Always Forward" pretty much captured the earthbound, quotidian pulse of life in Seymour. For the Class of 1957, no exhortation to dream, to reach for the stars, to discover the cure for cancer or solve world poverty. Instead a rallying cry to go slow, in one direction. Somehow that would be the flavor of his address to his classmates. How dopey it was then. How constrained by modesty and convention. How far they'd traveled to come to this place in their lives fifty years later. It wasn't all worked out. But it would probably come together when he was actually up there and everyone had mellowed out with conversation and a few drinks and the great food.

Just as our small talk was lapping the same punchlines the guy with the car dealership took his place at the microphone and started the introductions. In time honored fashion each classmate in turn awkwardly stood and said who they were and how many offspring they'd produced and what they'd been doing for the last million years. Most of them hadn't been doing much. They were nice folks, they were decent folks, they were good citizens, and they were farmers or clerks or housewives, with a few exceptions. They all had children with children. Some of their children's children had children.

It took a while to get all the way around the room. By the time the introductions were over and it was time for Jim to go to the podium, the sun was mostly set. I watched him accept the mike from Harold and step behind the lectern, his figure a silhouette against the skyline. I knew in an instant he was in trouble. There was no reading light for him. And his cheaters were somewhere in the hotel room seventeen miles away. Unable to read his notes and facing a sea of strange faces he defaulted to an opening line about the class motto. "One step at a time" he said. "Always forward." The silence was deafening. A better woman than I was would have cued the ironic chuckle that he needed. But this crowd was not into irony. This crowd was listening earnestly for the point. That he was going. To make. What? Too long married, I sweated with him through the horrible old people jokes that he gamely dragged out of the only part of his brain that was not completely whited out. I pretended to be annoyed when a really offensive line about saggy breasts got a laugh. But in the weird world of panic, I was proud that he got any reaction at all. Amazingly he held on. Both the wings fell off his little craft. The fuselage had a gaping hole in it. And there was fire leaping out of the cockpit when he landed a torturous interval later. Here's the thing, though. He never bailed. And that is so Class of '57!