This morning I woke up feeling great, and had already read the newspaper by the time I met my neighbor and walking partner at 6 a.m. From the first step of our walk we were in full chat mode.

A major topic was a wedding invitation I recently received, from two of my high school classmates. Not long ago I saw the bride-to-be at a memorial service for another classmate. My mother, who also attended the memorial service, struck up a conversation with the bride-to-be, who disclosed that she had already been married five times, and was about to wed again.

As we drove home after the memorial, my mother asked if I knew that the lady had been married five times. I said that I did, but her record didn't beat Elizabeth Taylor or my mom's friend Mark, who has been married nine times. “Well, after five marriages, why doesn’t she just live with the guy, so she won’t have to go to all the trouble of getting another divorce?” my mother wondered. Knowing that they were already living together, I left the question unanswered.

My neighbor laughed at my story and agreed with my mother that maybe the couple should just keep living together and let it go at that. I responded, however, that living together is not the same thing as marriage, which has a real binding tone to it. I remembered someone once telling me that ‘Marriage isn’t a word, it’s a sentence—for life.” Well, maybe so, but that doesn't mean that the sentence can't be spent in paradise.

Continuing the conversation, I told my neighbor that yet another female classmate had asked aloud, after receiving her invitation to the wedding, how the bride had managed to get six different men to marry her. After her own divorce in 1975, this lady said, she had never gotten even one more husband. Must be some hidden talent that other women don’t have, she mused.

"I wonder what that talent might be," my neighbor said. And I wondered, too. Here’s to the bride and groom!

Have a great day!

Stan