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Richard and I got together for dinner yesterday after work. It was a beautiful spring evening, bright and crisp and clear, and worlds apart from our last dinner way back in the darkening days of early December.

He seemed in good spirits, at least in as much as he ever seems in good spirits, and I think took pleasure in having an ear to complain to about this frustration and that disappointment. He is looking forward to his retirement next year, or at least looking forward to leaving a job he loathes.

He brought an envelope of old pictures dating back mostly to 1967 and his time at Parris Island, and in Okinawa, and in Vietnam. There were grainy images of barracks and latrines, cute Japanese girls on a beach, full military dress at an award ceremony, rice paddies and water buffalo and rifles, and Richard at twenty-two, twenty-three, dark-haired and smooth-faced and, if not entirely innocent, at least less broken than the man sitting next to me.

An old friend of Richard's died a couple months ago, a man with whom he shared more than forty years of history: travels together, stories, and such abundant love that Richard said he pretty much fell apart for a few weeks after the death even though Doug had been battling cancer for years.

During our dinner Richard mistakenly thought that my shirt was buttoned unevenly (though entirely possible, generally speaking, this was not the case last night!), and started to reach over the table to show me. He mentioned that he has a tendency to do the same, and that Doug was forever having to re-button his shirts.

The tenderness caught there in Richard's hands as he pantomimed Doug reaching up to re-do a top button, murmuring, "I was so sure we would grow old together," was enough to break this girl's heart.