Remembering the Ohs

I wanted to do a best list for the decade. You know, my picks for best movies and books and short stories and music and, I dunno, food trends. But I don’t really remember a lot of that – or at least I don’t remember it in any quantifiable way, in a way I can sort and post in a pithy list form.

So this is what I’m going to do. I’m posting my most memorable moments of the decade. Those personal moments that have stuck with me. Because, hell, it’s my blog. So, here we go:

I remember meeting my wife. A wine tasting. Too much wine but not so much as to dull. Not so much as to make that first kiss anything less than spinning, lost, thrown through time. I remember sitting on my stoop a week later and looking at her beside me and knowing I loved her. Knowing. Knowing, knowing.

I remember the births of both my children. The first long and fogged. Everything torn from me except love. The second like completion. Like fate.

I remember 9/11. I remember crouching in the bathroom at my office and crying because I could think of nothing else to do. I remember walking down 17th Street in DC that night and seeing all the bars full. I remember being able to talk about nothing else for weeks and singing the national anthem alone in my car.

I remember moving back to Texas. I remember my son, a toddler then, running circles in the empty living room and realizing this would be the first home he’ll ever know.

I remember poker. Which poker? I don’t remember. But I remember a lot of pocket aces and pocket seven twos off. I remember my heart beating my ribs as I waited on a stranger to call or fold. I remember the pride of a big stack. And the hollowness of a short one.

I remember a perfect double rainbow seen while in a traffic jam on I-95.

I remember my son reaching up and wiping a tear from my cheek as we laid my grandfather to rest.

I remember my dog falling through the ice in the middle of a lake and somehow living.

I remember a single bite of transcendent sushi from Bar Charlie.

I remember a lot more. New friends. Travels. All those kisses from my kids. All those walks. And all those nights spent awake into the wee hours as I tried to find that perfect word for that ultimately failed story. Hell, there is so much to remember. Just the other day I was joking with my wife that it’s a shame we didn’t do anything this decade. Really, I’m not sure we could’ve done more. Despite the troubles the world faced these past ten years, I’ll remember the ohs (the aughts?) for so many good things. So many personal things. Things that seem much more lasting than any movies or books or albums. As great as some of them were. As much as they deserve lists of their own.