We found this about a mile and a half north. It had survived a couple of high tides, but not the one last night. It was gone this morning.

It’s one of those phrases. “Poor kitties” is another. I should probably list more, but two will do. Today is our anniversary. Forty-fifth, unless you count our time together as a couple, which pushes it to fifty. We have a lot of lines and inside jokes that no one gets but the two of us. We were laughing about that this morning as we walked. We were out for about an hour.

Nothing last forever, certainly nothing human. But we have lasted a very long time as a couple. Fifty years is a long time in people-years. Three or more lifetimes for a dog or cat. Thirty-seven thousand high tides.

Numbers.

Human beings are devoted to numbers. it is our fundamental technology, like nest-building for some birds. Spiderwebs. I recall being told that a mother cat licks each kitten by way of counting them. Perhaps. Certainly a mother cat keeps track of her kits. But cats care nothing for mathematics.

My English students complained about doing math in my class. I thought they should understand how many words they read in a minute, what a score of 67/90 points worked out to as a grade (74%, a C). They thought they should not have to deal with such calculation unless they were at the other end of the school in a math class. Once, when I passed back an exam worth 50 points, an Honors English student started to haul out his calculator. He was taking Trigonometry that term and needed a tool to calculate his grade? I about had a fit. Double your score and that’s your percentage! How do you not know that?

I was never one of those girls who are “not good at math.” I loved math in school. I still do. I use it all the time, numbers running through my head as I bake or sew, the way they used to run through my head as a runner. (When I could not compute minutes/mile on a run I knew I needed a walking break. Thirty seconds. Maybe forty seconds of walking. I would return to a run and recompute how much time I would spend on the distance.)

Hood-to-Coast is this weekend, that Mt Hood to Seaside relay. I ran it five times, 1996-2000, first out of the second van, about 16 miles total. My pace on a very good day running the beach or even highway hills in those days was 8.5 minute miles, but usually I ran a steady nine minute mile. I never got close to that on the Hood to Coast. In 1996, the temperature on my first 6.2 mile leg was 96°F, already rated “very hard” for hills and distance. I had never run in heat before, but I maintained a steady pace. The night run was another sort of revelation. I had never run in the dark before, and it was lovely. I calculated my speed throughout my three runs. Another runner commented that my first mile and my sixth were almost exactly the same speed. Oh yes.

My last long run was from home to school on the first day of in-service in 2011. I underestimated the distance by a half mile and I forgot to wear my new shoes. By the time I was into my sixteenth mile I ran slow and would have taken a ride if Gary had not lost me along the way. My shoes were flat and I damaged my feet that morning. My minutes/mile do not bear thinking about. I would never run further than four miles again.

Numbers.

Fifty years married. During that time, my husband and I have traveled together and apart, completed five college degrees, worked in a dozen retail businesses and for five public agencies, saw through life ten dogs and five cats and a conure and a parrot, raised two sons, lived in three homes, bought seven vehicles, but I will not count the times we each lost our tempers and did incredibly stupid, bonehead things for which we have been forgiven. The love does not take to counting.

This morning we took our walk. We walked north and then south to home again, about three miles. Sometimes we walked side by side and sometimes fifty yards apart. I picked up seven shells, he gathered seven bits of beach trash. We’ve missed our walk only a couple of times this summer. A few times we walked twice. Sometimes we walked a couple of miles, and on an ambitious day we walked five. I will be 67 in a couple of months, he will be 70 in eight days.

Those numbers do not matter at all, of course. That’s just our technology—a foolish way of measuring progress.

It’s about glancing up shore to see where Gary is walking. It’s about knowing he is there. It’s about the walk. Not about how far or when we arrive. We arrived a long time ago.

Happy anniversary, sweetheart.