Good morning my “man”! I hope you slept well and had sweet dreams of moi! I am going to figure out a way to get into those dreams yet! <smiles>
I had an interesting discussion with a young lady this evening. (Okay, okay…so I got into a fight in group chat. And it was not even my fight…but you know how I am about what I perceive to be an injustice and people who think they know it all!) <Cover’s her bumps and bruises so he can’t see them!> But when I began to talk with the young woman who had been treated so badly, we spoke of love and kids and parents and of course….YOU! I mentioned to her that I had met the most AMAZING man and that he treated me like a princess! And she said “That’s what it is all about! Sometimes you gotta eat a lot of cereal before you get to the decoder!” And I LOVED IT! It seems like I have been eating a LOT of cereal! Not too many bowls..just a few REALLY big ones…and FINALLY I have gotten to the decoder!
I know that once you finally got to that decoder it would help you translate a special message that your favorite cereal character had left for you on the back of the box…and without the decoder…all the words were useless jabber. Sometimes I feel like that about you, love. It seems that all my life I have collected bits and pieces of information that made NO sense to me. All the time I was sitting there eating that DREADFUL cereal I would look at the information and TRY my hardest to decipher it. But no matter what I did, I could not understand it. So I just kept eating…and hoping that SOMEDAY I would finally get the decoder and it would all make sense to me. There were SO many times that I wanted to give up. I wanted to throw the cereal and the BOX in the trash and forget it! There were days that I thought I just could NOT eat one more bowl of that tasteless crap and just KNEW I would never make it to the bottom of the box. But finally, one day, as I grabbed the box and started to pour another bowl of the same old gruel, I could see it! There in the corner at the very bottom was a shiny piece of plastic wrapper and as I pulled at it gingerly, I could see the gold decoder start to glimmer in the light! What a treasure! There were many others who claimed that the decoder was theirs, but I knew better. It was almost as though I could feel the electric current flow through my fingers as I touched it, and I KNEW…I would not give it up for ANYTHING!
Many others gathered around as they watched me pull it from the box, they had heard that I had found the decoder and they were curious. “Those things never work you know!” one would say. And I could hear another “Yeah…I ate an ENTIRE box of cereal at one sitting once just to get the decoder…and it was broken! It was worthless. I hope you don’t get your hopes up!” they said snidely as they looked at me, rolling their eyes. And in the background there was another voice “Yeah, I finally got mine…and was SO happy and then when I ran it over the message it said something like…”your lucky number is 3476”…what is THAT supposed to mean??” But that did not stop me. I slowly pulled the wrapped decoder from the box and dusted the crumbs from it. Everyone stood around and looked at me. It seemed to glow with the sun when I would look at it and I could tell the others wanted it too. One of them looked at me and just said “Hmph….no big deal!” and walked off. The other just smiled and walked off with an evil grin. I KNEW she was just WAITING for me to set it down so she could grab it and break it, like she did everything she touched! And the other one just patted me on the shoulder as she said skeptically “I hope it works for you. I have never been able to get one to work!” and walked off shaking her head.
But I grabbed the empty box of cereal and ran to the corner out of every ones sight and slowly opened the wrapper. I held the decoder in my hand for a long time, holding it up to the light to look at it more closely. It was beautiful! It was even BETTER than the picture portrayed and the more I looked at it the more nervous I became, knowing the secrets it could reveal and how it could change my life. I held it to my heart for a few moments, literally feeling like it was going to pound out of my chest and then I gently laid it over the scribbled text on the box. One by one it began to decipher the text until finally I could read it. It said “Never walk behind the horses in a parade!” WHAT????? What did that mean? And I could hear all the words of the others that had stood behind me and watched me pull it out. Could it be that they were right?
But there was just something inside of me that knew that this decoder was different from the rest. It HAD done it’s job after all…it DID decode the silly message on the box and so…slowly…one at a time, I began to pull out the papers that I had collected all these years and hidden in my pocket. I knew they were important, but I could not understand them. I had hidden them and they had become my “secrets”. They were old and crumpled and I was certain that it was silly to even THINK that the decoder could make sense of such ancient scribble. But I once again picked it up and held it tenderly. I could feel my hands start to tremble as I flattened the first paper out and gently laid the decoder over it. It almost seemed that it lit up as it touched my secrets….and as I moved it over the letters, one by one…all the questions that had plagued my mind and troubled my heart for so long were revealed! I grabbed it and held it to my breast and cried and cried after the first one was decoded and then I started on another…and it seemed that no matter how old, no matter how hard, the decoder easily translated each one and revealed yet another thing to me that changed the way I saw things and thought about life.
As I walked back into the main room all the others looked at me and their mouths dropped open as they watched me float across the floor. They knew. They knew that the decoder had not only worked and translated all that I had asked of it, it had transformed my life. I looked at them smiling as I watched them pour themselves another bowl of cereal and suddenly, the horrible cereal was just a memory and well worth every spoonful.
Thank you, love….you have truly been the key to many of the unanswered questions in my life. I will take care to treasure “my decoder” and never let it go.
Forever…your loving wife…D
