Lapis lazuli is the stone for the 32nd anniversary. I only looked it up a couple of weeks ago. The stone is blue, and its name in Latin means “stone of the heavens.”

Today is mine and Stephen’s 32nd anniversary. I bought us matching lapis lazuli rings for our anniversary. They arrived yesterday from a jeweler in southern California.

Thirty-two years is a long time. Practically a lifetime. I know many people who never even made it to or past that age. But here we are. Against all the motherfucking odds. (Sorry: I thought that I would’ve already thought about death sufficiently throughout my childhood, but it seems that there’s still so much more about death that I need to think.)

I’ve written about this story before. It’s a tale of love across the continents that involves Reagan’s Amerika and the Warsaw Uprising, and a silly boy from a farm in east Texas living on an even sillier farm in rural Poland, just downwind of the Polkolor plant. A long journey into Warsaw to use the telephones at the Marriott, and a one-way Pan Am flight in early August, just months before the Soviet Union—and Pan Am itself—was dissolved.

Since I’m pulling back from social media, I decided to return to my poor, neglected blog to post today’s thoughts. I’ll end with a thought that has been with me even longer than 32 years but that becomes ever more insistent and relevant: Nietzsche’s (or Zarathustra’s) “Well then, once more!”