happy birthday, sally

20th anniversary @ Orcas IslandHappy Birthday, my beloved Salvatore! It's an impossible task to adequately describe what a gift you are, so I've settled for reminding you with a small, small, small sample of ways that you have imprinted your soul into mine.

• The way you still laugh as hard at the movies and shows that delight you as you did the first time you saw them. Not everything holds up, and sometimes you have to be in the right mood for it, but when it does and when you are...you laugh, and it makes me laugh, and it's like getting to watch it again for the first time.
• Your unbroken streak of picking out the exact perfect card for me every time. Birthdays, anniversaries, holidays, just-becauses, thinking-of-yous, I'm-sorries...you are seriously a card-picking savant. I've kept every one, framed a few, wanted to frame many more. I imagine that if someone who never met me opened a box full of these cards and laid them all out, they would know me without even reading what you wrote inside them.
• I love all the characters and voices you create, but my favorite character is Big Al and whatever he's selling in his barn that day. The day we drove past the big metal barn that had "BARNS" emblazoned on the side, we looked at each other and both knew without saying a word: Big Al and his Barns Barn. It was like discovering the singularity.
• After we watched Pride & Prejudice the first time, you spent weeks afterward saying "Capital, capital!" whenever you were pleased with something. It was adorable.
• That day several months ago, a typical work day for me, when I was trying to complete an impossible task list with an equally impossible deadline, and had jotted down the do-or-die-must-complete-at-all-costs-before-tomorrow things on a yellow sticky note stuck to my laptop, with the ominous words "MUST DO TODAY" written at the top, and I realized after you left for work that you had added an item: "Love yourself". I've looked it almost every day since.

Thank you for being you, Sally. I love you.