So 24 is what? Pewter?

Happy Pewter Anniversary to Mate and me!

Huzzah!  Hooray!  Can we sleep in?

See, today may be our anniversary, but this weekend was the San Francisco Marathon, and Mate ran the half-course, so I got to be his plus-sized cheerleader on the sidelines.

It was really a pretty wonderful time.

We got to SF early Saturday, so Mate could sign in, and then we checked into the hotel which was sort of amazingly awesome.  You know that house in Harry Potter– Sirius Black’s House– the one that was sort of squeezed between two other buildings?  This hotel was JUST LIKE THAT.  It was the Hotel Griffon, and it was Squished between the YMCA and something else.  It was a luxury hotel–but the rooms were laid out like those little tiny perfectly engineered spaces where every cubic foot counts.  And although from our room, we had a view of Steuert street, from the opposite end of the hallway, this was the view.

Look at that.  The Embarcadero and the Bay Bridge.  Can you beat that?  Not with a flogger and a bullwhip, that’s for damned sure!  Anyway, we got back and ate lunch at Gott’s, which is inside the Embarcadero, and I took this picture from our picnic table while devouring an ahi burger that would have made angels weep.

So, you know, there was that.

The next day, we got up at crotch-o-dawn a.m. so Mate could go run.  Our original plan was for me to stick my head out of that window with the view of the bay, but I took one look out there in the morning and thought I wanted to actually see him run by, so I ran downstairs and was in place in time for the seventh wave (no, not the Sting song) and I got to see him run by.  Of course, I couldn’t have actually seen him if he hadn’t waved at me and flagged me down, because geez, among all my other weaknesses, apparently picking a face out of a mass of humanity goes down as a really frickin’ huge one.  Anyway, he’s in that mass of humanity photographed below– and he’s in a red shirt and he’s waving madly to me– yay!

 After that, I ran and hopped on the MASSIVELY uncomfortable shuttle designed for carrying grade school kids, UGH, and we drove to the three mile mark.  Of course Mate, being a good and smart Mate, had my phone programmed to track his progress, and as we neared the three mile mark, I realized that he’d passed this mark twenty minutes earlier, so, that was futile.

I did, however, manage to get to the finish line about a twenty minutes before he got there–and that almost proved my undoing.  There I was, waiting patiently, checking his progress from marker to marker, and figuring out, “Hey, he should be here in about five… minutes…” when he suddenly waved his arm RIGHT IN FRONT OF ME and shouted my name.  I was so busy looking at my phone figuring out when he SHOULD get there, I almost missed him when he DID get there, and that would have sucked.  But I waved madly back and that as awesome.

See– and here’s some background you might have needed– when Mate ran the full marathon in San Diego, back about ten years ago when I was pregnant with Zoomboy, he thought we missed him come in.  We had no way to track him and he was about two hours later than all his peers.  I’d been at the finish line with four kids (two of them belonged to another friend) and they were hot and bored and burning (seriously– blistering burning because it was overcast and they were sitting on the metal bleachers) and I didn’t want to miss him.  But I’d been sort of whiny during the entire trip (no, this doesn’t reflect well on me either) and he thought I’d just bailed on watching him come in because he didn’t see us even though we were there, and we got into a big hairy fight (which is really unlike us) and I had to burst into tears and tell him that we wouldn’t do that to him– we were proud of him.

Well, this time around, I wasn’t pregnant and hauling four kids around, so I was in a much better and much more supportive frame of mind, and he hadn’t been listening to me whine for three days, so he was much more appreciative of his own personal cheerleader.  And when he came in, I looked up and we saw each other and I was there at the finish (although we must have walked right past each other there at the end) and I got a picture of him, holding a medal, with the finish line in sight.

And see– marriage does get better as it gets older, who knew that was even possible, right?

I didn’t.  I do now.  Because the pewter or half marathon or San Francisco anniversary was really really rock awesome, and I’m so proud of my Mate that I could cry.

And did I mention that, twenty-six and a half years ago, our first date was in San Francisco.  We weren’t really dating– it was just supposed to be as friends, and another friend bailed–but I loved him so much even then, and watching one of the last Journey concerts with the guy you loved when you got to walk around the City by the Bay before then– well, that’s gotta be called a date.  I think he remembers it as a date–sometimes the best memories really are the ones you create after the fact, right?  Anyway, so we got to go back to our city, and we got to put paid to one sort of crappy memory with a really really awesome memory, and twenty-four years isn’t nearly long enough.