PART 1
I am eighty-six years old, and I only learned how to use this recently, because I needed somewhere to put it and I have run out of people my own age.
My granddaughter set it up for me on a Sunday.
It took her about four minutes and she did not ask what I wanted it for, which I was grateful for and which I have since decided she did on purpose.
I have typed this out over eleven days with two fingers.
My name is Thaddeus.
A few days ago my wife Maribeth passed away. She was eighty-four.
For sixty years I believed she was my wife in every sense of the word.
And those sixty years were good years.
I want that said at the very top, before anything else, because of where the rest of this goes and because I do not want one word of what follows read as a complaint about my marriage.
They were good years. All sixty of them. There were four bad ones in the middle, around 1979, and even those were ours.
I loved that woman more than I ever worked out how to say.
I first noticed her at college, in a corridor outside a lecture room, in the October of 1963.
She was carrying too many books and she dropped none of them, which is the detail I have kept for sixty-two years.
The moment I saw her, something in me simply knew I wanted her in my life. I have never been able to improve on that sentence in sixty years of trying.
It took me nearly a year to talk her into giving me a chance.
She has told that story at about four hundred dinners over sixty years, and the number of weeks it took goes up every single time she tells it.
By the end it was eleven months and a petition. There was no petition.
Then I joined the Army, in the January, for reasons that made sense at twenty-five and that I could not defend now.
