I have lived 30 minutes from Tybee Island for the last 25 years, and until recently, I very rarely loaded into the car and made the drive. It may be because the first thing I ever saw on Tybee was a large woman wearing a star-spangled thong bikini, twirling a baton and somehow leading a Chihuahua on a leash through discarded boiled peanut shells near the beach. (There are some things you simply cannot unsee, and that, my friends, is one of them.) It may be the traffic, which is beastly and surprisingly dangerous on summer weekends, thanks to an old two-lane beach road winding through the marshes and populated with people in a terrible hurry. It may be my skin tone, which is slightly lighter than a sheet of copy paper and which carries the need to apply liberally a sunscreen with an SPF approximating a total eclipse of the sun. It may be all sorts of things. But one thing is certain: Until three or so years ago, I lived close to a beach only in theory, never in practice.

And then it dawned on me that I lived close to a beach, and I felt — I don’t know — ungrateful or lacking a certain generosity of spirit or just plain stupid for never making the drive. The revelation coincided with the realization that I needed to be a whole lot happier, and standing in the sand always seems to advance that ball. So I began working on Chris. Take advantage of self-employment, I would whisper. Let’s spend every Wednesday afternoon of summer sneaking out of work at 3:30 and heading to the beach. This proposition has had moderate success, if you define “every Wednesday afternoon of summer” as “once every six to eight weeks of summer.”

The problem here is the “sneaking out of work” part. A mere 16 years away from traditional retirement age, I find myself both with work that I love and absolutely no compunction about turning off the lights and shutting the office door at the end of the day. (Why do I have absolutely no compunction about throwing in the workday towel? Chris has plenty of compunction for the both of us.)

He surprised me at 3 p.m. on Tuesday by telling me that Tybee beckoned. The day was cool and overcast and not at all lovely, and in shorts, long sleeved shirts, and ball caps, the two of us went to the beach. We held hands, and we walked in silence except when I was talking, which is to say that we walked in silence roughly 7% of the time.

Tuesday was our 25th wedding anniversary.

I cried all day.

That is what happens when I get overwhelmed by emotion.

That is what happened Tuesday.

The day first seemed to call for something monumental, and we talked a lot about how we wanted to celebrate it. There was a discussion about a trip to Vegas and a renewal of our vows in front of an Elvis impersonator. We thought about a party and surprising our guests with a backyard wedding. We looked into Caribbean resorts, fancy dinners, expensive hotels.

In the end, it hit me that our daily life together had become so sweet — filled with trips and friends and parties and dinners — that I wanted nothing more than to load into our little convertible and drive that dangerous drive.

But this was not quite true, for after a moment of reflection, I realized that I also wanted a ring. I wear three different bands that Chris has gotten me through the years, and they all mean different things to me. And now I wanted a fourth band, which (like all the others) would be Chris’ choice.

So we walked in silence along the beach, except when we didn’t. I offered astute observations about Pro Kadima, the wooden paddles and ball set played for exactly five minutes to appease whiny children on beaches up and down the coast, and opined that in my many years of going to these beaches, I had seen only Amateur Kadima. I stopped to take pictures; we mimicked the calls of the seagulls; I watched everyone walk by. I marveled at how many families left the beach in the throes of a fight. Chris wondered if we would ever have a little house at Tybee. And at some point, as I yammered on about something equally important, I felt Chris fall behind me, and then he grabbed my arm and turned me around.

I would, he began, and he started moving toward me an object grasped in his right hand. I looked down, and all I could see was a small tag that said MADE IN THE U.S.A. As he tried to pull off the tag, he said, I would want you to know that this ring was MADE IN THE U.S.A. That is exactly what I would want you to know.

The band that was MADE IN THE U.S.A. is a slender, plain platinum band. The other three from Chris are much flashier and more substantial, and they were the perfect delivery mechanisms for the messages that they bore. This one was, too. It is quiet and comfortable, and it is a ring very much secure in itself.

And rather than cry even more that day, I took the ring from Chris and removed the tag, and as he slipped it on my finger, he told me what he wanted me to know: that he would marry me all over again.

Our daughter has been fascinated lately about our relationship. How have you stayed married so long? she asks. How have you made it work? I have thought about her questions and our talks a lot lately, and I have no definite answers. I read an essay about how couples change, to the point people within the same relationship feel as if they are in a second or third marriage. (And indeed, that is what one of the flashier rings represents.) I have resisted the temptation to quantify marriage as hard or easy — it has been both at varying times, and sometimes both at the same time — and think of it instead as constant: a series of days with my best friend. I tell her that you get married, and that you think you are in love, and that the years prove that you had no idea exactly of the depths that that word encompassed as you stood at the altar in a fancy white dress. In her least favorite moments of being lectured by her mother, I point at the live oaks lining our street, and how they start far apart and in their own spaces, and how as the years pass, they tangle root and branch. (I know, she says. You always say that.)

Chris and I finished the walk, and we ate seafood, and I toasted the union with the most delicious margarita I had ever had. We spoke of all the changes over the first 25 years, and how, if our good luck held, we would get to watch the changes over the next 25 years, at which time he would be 75 and I would be 73. This seemed as unfathomable to me as the thought of being 48 seemed 25 years ago.

When we got home, I realized that I had missed my father’s second call of the day. I think of him every year on our anniversary, and how expertly he walked me down the aisle, as if he had married off millions of other daughters. Slow down, he said. Not so fast. This is your big day. I can see in my mind’s eye the last photo in the wedding album, where Dad is trying not to cry as the car drives off. We toast Dad every year on our anniversary, for he sends us a check to fund one of those fancy dinners.

I sat on the back steps and returned his calls, the rain drumming lightly on the porch roof. We talked, and I congratulated myself for not screwing it up for the last 25 years, and I told him that if I had the same day 25 years from now, I would be perfectly happy and exceedingly content. My 72 year-old father promised to call me in 25 years to wish me a happy 50th anniversary. I would like nothing more than that to happen, I replied.

And I meant it. After too many years of thinking that a marriage was made in the big moments, it finally hit me that this was it. A drive together. A walk. A plain band MADE IN THE U.S.A. Friendship. A nearby beach. A delicious margarita. The happy wishes of the people you love.

I hung up the phone, and I cried a little more, and then I dried my eyes. There was ice cream to be had — a small, pleasing, and increasingly infrequent ritual — and then there was bedtime, so that the day could start all over again.

ALC

P.S. — Here we are, then (June 1992) and now (June 2017).