Becky let me know before we left for Austin that she had only two goals on this workation of ours: 1)Sleep late 2)Eat lots.

She’s a simple woman. And I love this about her.

After sleeping eleven hours the first night (apparently, she was a tad on the sleep deprived side) I set out to achieve her second goal.  Yesterday evening we ate at The County Line.  Sausage, Chicken, and candy disguised as pork ribs. Jesus, you have blessed me tremendously in my short life but none has pleased me like the plate of goodness that was County Line Bar-B-Q.  Thank you.  Amen.

None of it was raw.  None of it was what one might call healthy.  I ingested exactly zeros vegetables.  Even so, it is well with my soul.  My entire digestive system fro my esophagus to my colon has not stopped smiling.

Then we were off to The Oasis on Lake Travis, billed as the “Sunset Capital of Texas.” We’d been warned by many that the food is so-so and a tad expensive, so we just went for the big show and some sopapillas for dessert.

The Oasis burned down – struck by lightning – in 2005 and has just recently been fully reconstructed to its original six-story self.  Six stories of decks and balconies, all facing the water and packed with sunset-watchers every evening. 

We sat on the second level under an umbrella, talking without any interruptions and with nowhere to be next.  The show began.

We talked about how time speeds up the older we get, like the sun moving across Earth’s sky: It seems like gravity is pulling the sun down faster in those last few inches toward the horizon.

We dated for five years and this month we’ll have been married for eleven.  Maybe, we thought, time seems to be speeding up because we see each so much less than we did in college.  Maybe time apart has a pace much quicker than time together.

But that must not be true, because the hours we spent eating, laughing, wondering about the future, retelling the past and staring out across the lake didn’t feel long enough.

It’s simple math, I think.  One year to a five year-old is one fifth of their life.  That’s a long time.  But one year when we’re in our thirties is a much smaller percentage of all we’ve already experienced.  The older we get the smaller that percentage becomes and the more rapidly time seems to pass.

With our lives somewhere around high-noon (as far as we know), we wondered out loud what might be ahead of us, realizing we’re horrible prognosticators.  We remembered all the things we thought the future would hold before we met.  She wanted to be an accountant in Paris married to someone stable who never travelled and was always home for dinner. And I wanted to be a songwriter in Dallas living down the street from a Pappasito’s.

Then, when I was nineteen and she was twenty-three we became friends.  And then we became friends who kissed.  And then, years later, we were married and moved to Tennessee – far from Texas and even farther from France. These days I travel and I’m not always home for dinner and there’s not a Pappasito’s in sight.  And Becky falls behind on her sleep.  And there’s a house to clean and a yard to mow, a garage door to fix, a toilet to repair, bills to pay, business to run, planes to catch. Life moves quickly now. But last night we slowed down, hung out watching the sun set, talking like old friends, and even kissing a little – enjoying the show while it lasted.