Happy 90th anniversary, Sugar Plum

Suddenly, I feel very, very old. You see, every month I send Wonder Woman — aka my girlfriend — a bouquet of colorful flowers in honor of the anniversary of our first e-mail.

This month I phoned the flower store. The nice young woman asked what I wanted to say on the card. I replied, “Happy ninth anniversary.” Maybe I should have said “nine-month anniversary,” but this month I wanted to be different, because the Wonder Woman loves a good twist.

I signed the card in our traditional fashion: “More later, Jeff.”

The one requirement I always stipulate is that the bouquet be extremely colorful. You see, the Wonder Woman loves color.

Tuesday the bouquet reached her office. The card read, “Happy 90th anniversary.”

Now, I am not a rocket scientist. But I know such an anniversary is rare indeed. If the Wonder Woman and I had taken time out from skipping stones and climbing trees and gotten married at age 11, by our 90th anniversary we would both be 101.

According to oddsmakers, there’s a one in 10,000 chance I will reach 100. The odds are staggeringly less that the Wonder Woman and I will both reach that landmark.

But since I am now celebrating my 90th anniversary, thanks to the flower shop, it’s a good time to look back over a life well lived. Good thing the Wonder Woman and I were into nutrition, aerobics and massive vitamin and wrinkle cream consumption.

Even if we practiced safe nutrition, which is not common in America, we would both be in an advanced state of old fartiness. We’d both be chronically grousing over each other’s ceramic frog collections and turning down our hearing aids so the creaky knees didn’t deafen us every time we tried to stand.

I’d have more hair growing from my ears than from my head.

We’d have spent half our lives in old age collecting starched doilies and social insecurity and searching for car keys.

We’d have had enough senior moments and consumed enough stewed prunes to build tremendous loads of character.

Clipping toenails would have long since become more difficult than parallel parking.

Reaching 101 is amazing. It’s as if the credits rolled on the movie of life, and then the movie came back on.

Such feats of longevity are common in my family, which despite my dad’s dying of cancer at 70 is normally tremendously long lived. At my father’s graveside service, there were nine chairs lined up in the front row and filled with his aunts and uncles who were by then well into their 90s.

I had a great-uncle, in fact, who planned out his life far in advance. Luther Martin had it plotted when to leave the ranch for the senior community and then the nursing home. Turns out he remained so healthy he eventually moved back to the ranch.

I hope I am equally lucky. There are lots of reasons to hope and want to live, not the least of which is for moments such as this when innocent mistakes have me rolling on the floor in hilarity. Just think of all the laughs another half century could bring.

This is not to disparage flower shops, by the way. I want to continue the bouquet tradition and don’t want them mad at me so next month they send a bouquet of weeds. Well, that might just work, anyway, as long as the weeds are colorful.

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