How could I have forgotten?
The look on my wife's face - and I suppose the look on my own - gave me away.
When I got home the other night, she asked me if I knew what day it was?
It took a couple of seconds, but it finally sank in.
We got engaged on Oct. 9.
The year? Well, let's just say it was awhile ago, 1982 to be exact. The same year I started working at the Daily Times.
It's one of the things that have bound us together all these years. We're newspaper people.
We both worked at the same newspaper in Coatesville, The Record. Yes, it shares something too many newspapers have in common these days. It no longer exists.
She worked in advertising; I was in news.
To get back to the composing room, where the paper was pasted up each day, you had to walk through advertising.
She always says that the first time she saw me storming through advertising at my usual, frenetic pace, she said, 'That's the man I'm going to marry.'
It must have been my dashing appearance in my spongy green pants, yellow acrylic shirt with the brown brocade and clogs.
I dress a lot better today. A tie is mandatory. Not much else has changed.
I'm still in the newspaper racket. She had the good sense to get out.
We had been dating for a little more than four years, and I think she was getting impatient.
I was kind of comfortable, to be honest.
We were at a fairly raucous wedding involving some of my Philadelphia cousins when she decided to push the issue.
I proposed on the dance floor and then repeated it - I think she wanted to be sure she had heard it right - at Denny's where we stopped for breakfast on the way home. I probably should not have been driving, and I think she was hoping that some coffee and something to eat would sober me up a bit. It was one of many things she would had yet to learn about me and my family. Those Philadelphia Herons are a partying crowd. Her family still talks about what went on at our wedding.
So I proposed over a Grand Slam breakfast.
Am I a romantic or what.
I always tell people I arrived at the Daily Times in June 1982, and I got married in June 1983.
A month before our planned nuptials, I informed my wife that I was going onto the night desk, which meant working nights and weekends. She was not thrilled.
But she still showed up on June 18.
She always reminds me that we got engaged on John Lennon's birthday, and we tied the knot on Paul McCartney's birthday.
Imagine.
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