On June 8th, 1996, Dawn hitched her wagon to this donkey. Or as Father Leonard Savelkoul, the priest that presided over the hitching ceremony would have said when he was Mr. Savelkoul, presiding over History and Shop classes at Burke Central High School, she married “Some Rufus.”

I suppose more accurately, Dawn and this Rufus consolidated their individual wagons into one and hitched it to an idea. An idea, “a representation of something imagined, known, or proposed in the mind” is often the starting gun that propels us out of the blocks, that prompts us to start, to begin, to go. To go where?

On a running track there are lines and lanes guiding your direction, and there is an obvious start and finish line to help you gauge the effort required of you to get from the beginning to the end in the most efficient and timeliest manner. Marriage is like many things, but a running track is not one of those things.

Marriage is more like a shotgun start in a golf tournament of undetermined length. “How many holes do we play?” You play until death. “What if my partner farts and snores while I’m trying to putt?” Deal with it, you’re no peach yourself. So it goes.

Even though we consolidated our wagons 30 years ago, it seems important that our individual wagons were not just left to the mercy of time and neglect at the starting line. That the starting line of “us” didn’t mark the end of who we were before the idea of us began to take shape.

30 years…what that means now, the idea of that now, is something that I couldn’t have imagined at the start. At the start it all seemed so straight forward. Things are rarely as they seem.

Some days we pull in the same direction, covering ground efficiently and effortlessly, some days we pull in opposite directions, both exerting effort to overcome the other, sometimes for better…sometimes for worse. Some days one of us just can’t, or won’t, pull for whatever reason, leaving it entirely up to the other to maintain forward momentum or at least try and steady the wagon for another go on another day.

And some days, possibly the best days, we aren’t trying to move forward, we aren’t trying to hold it steady, we aren’t straining to keep it from rolling back down that hill we just climbed. We are simply lying in the shade of our wagon, resting in preparation for the road to come and reminiscing about the road behind.

In celebration and recognition of our 30 years, Dawn and I decided to park our wagon in Italy for a bit of rest, reminiscing, and roaming about. I found that roaming about cities and structures that have been roamed about for thousands of years had a way of putting our time, our lives, and the jumbled interconnectedness of the whole of humankind into perspective.

Italy was a place we have both had an interest in exploring and experiencing for various reasons. During our travels we crossed paths with some of the paths that Dawn’s grandfather, Raymond Kwasnieski, had taken after landing at Anzio with the 361st Infantry Division in June of 1944. Beautiful and historical places that we are able to freely roam about because of people like him.

Places speak to different people in different ways. Ways in which you can’t really know until you are in those places. Italy filled the heart and the soul of Dawn’s wagon while stimulating the mind of mine. Different places, but the space between is easy enough to traverse, and after 30 years, it’s a route we both know well.

Wants, needs, desires, aversions…ideas…human stuff. Human stuff that moves wagons, for better, for worse, from there to here and beyond.