25 Years--The Good Stuff

I watch lots of video clips for school. At the beginning of my current class, I had to watch a short clip from Good Will Hunting—a counseling session between Robin Williams and Matt Damon.* Williams is talking about his late wife’s idiosyncrasies, and instead of dwelling on how bugged he was by them, he laughingly remembered them with tears in his eyes, calling those things about her “the good stuff.”

I have never seen the movie, but I thought about that clip for a long time. It’s all in your perspective, isn’t it? You can either allow those little things to grate on you until they become grains of sand in your shoe, or you can see them as endearing . . . the good stuff.

Here is some of the good stuff about my man.

Brad is the pickiest peanut butter and jelly sandwich eater in the world. Both the peanut butter and the jam have to be spread exactly to the edge of every inch of crust, and not over the edge. He also needs a big glass of milk with it. No exceptions.

Brad has the flattest and smoothest palms. I still remember the first time I held his hand and noticed how flat they are.

Brad uses less than one stick of deodorant a year. You read that correctly. A year. He rarely sweats and will only apply deodorant if he knows it’s going to be a stressful day (like going to court).

Brad hated rice before he served his mission—to Japan. Now he loves it.

Brad says, “Take it eeeeeeeasssssy,” with just that inflection, purposely to annoy me.

Brad has multi-colored eyes—a brown ring around his iris and a green ring around the brown. The older he’s gotten, the lighter his eyes have become. This picture makes them look red--it's an old one. The naked baby on the treadmill is Micah.

Brad has never minded his early grey hair (not so early now that he’s 47, but he had a few on his head when we married), especially after he graduated from law school. He figured the older he looked, the wiser he looked, and the more he could charge per hour. Always thinking. Always thinking.

Brad rarely snores, but he does breathe really loud with a slight clicky noise at the end of each breath on occasion. He also claims that he never sleeps better than when he’s sleeping diagonal on a king bed.

Brad is turning more and more Libertarian as he ages—not only does he want the government to leave him alone, he wants people in general to leave him alone. (Not really. I thought it was funny. The Libertarian part is true, though.)

Brad can’t touch his toes, but he can pick his nose with his tongue.

Brad has an itchy spot on his back that never goes away—just above his left shoulder blade. Every night before bed, he will turn his back to me, raise his shirt and say, “ITCHY SPOT!” I will scratch that spot until dark-red, nearly bloody stripes crisscross his back. Then he’ll sigh a long sigh and say, “Yeah. Thanks.”

Brad always wipes around the toiled bowl and puts the toilet seat back down down when he’s finished. Lest you think he’s perfect, he will never put the toilet paper on the roll.

Brad carries a grudge that I threw away his fuchsia flannel shirt with giant bicycles, and he still reminds me on occasion. Ask him about it. He can recount every detail of that ugly thing.

Brad and I kept our relationship private, because we didn’t want anyone in our office to know we were dating. We were proofreaders, and we started leaving sticky notes for each other with “ILYCK” written on them—“I Love You Cute Kid.” We still use it all the time--as goodbye on the phone or in texts or with our kids.

Brad and his cousin Thatcher have been closer than brothers most of their lives. They even have their own English dialect called “The B/T Syntax.” At BYU, Brad wrote an upper-division English grammar paper about it, and his teacher gave him 100% because it was so funny (and because it was well written, I'm sure). If they’re ever together, the syntax immediately appears. You know it when you hear it.

Brad had a much more refined fashion sense than I did when we got married. He taught me how to iron a man’s shirt and how to dress. For the first birthday I had after we were married, he gave me $100 (a ton on our student budget) and took me shopping. I’ve trusted him ever since.

Brad loves movies and sometimes gets emotionally invested in them—much more than I do. When we saw “Beaches,” he cried so hard that he made me wait till everyone else left the theatre before he would leave.

I'm sure he could compile similar stories about me, but that's the beauty of having my own blog--I can publish my list.

That's the good stuff.

And he's all mine.

*The video clip from Good Will Hunting is filled with foul language and isn't something I would normally watch. If you'd like to see it, here's the link https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z8mn3nLPSMY. Be warned--the language may not be appropriate.