"A Thing of Beauty"...Aww, That Reminds Me

I just typed that our lawn was "a thing of beauty."

And it sent me back...

Because "a thing of beauty" is an inside joke in our marriage.  (And at our hairdresser's.)

Here's why:

When Greg and I decided to get married at Grace church, we went for several months of marriage counseling beforehand.  Pastor Brown wasn't going to marry us unless he was pretty sure we were actually going to STAY married, I suppose.

One of the first things that we did at counseling was fill out a long questionnaire.  Probably like the ones you do at match.com, only this was for people who had already--hopefully--found their match.  It was a super-quick and efficient way for Pastor Brown to get to know us as individuals and as a couple.  And I guess it also gave some rating of our compatibility, which was probably laughable considering how opposite we are.

So, the responses on Greg's questionnaire were pretty straightforward...because he is a pretty typical, straightforward kind of guy.

Mine was more long and elaborate, because I'm a pretty complicated kind of girl.

One of the questions had to do with the first meeting--on first sight kind of thing.

Strangely, my memory about the night that I met Greg was kind of hazy.  I remember thinking that he was handsome.  I remember what hat he was wearing.  I remember thinking that, from across the room, he seemed really tall.  (He is not actually terribly tall.)  And, I remember that when Jamie introduced us, he was sitting at a table with his buddies eating a pile of shrimp...with a pile of shrimp shells beside him.

There were no free seats around Greg, so he forcefully told the buddy sitting beside him to get lost and oh-so-chivalrously scraped the shrimp shrapnel away from the now-vacated spot.  And then he asked me to sit down.  And the rest is history.

Greg's answer to that same question (about his first sight of me) was so unlike any of his other extremely brief and to-the-point responses, that Pastor Brown stopped and laughed and laughed.  Greg had written:
"The first thing that attracted me to Aubrey was her amazing hair.  It was a thing of beauty."

So, there you have it.  My hair was so beautiful to Greg that he unkindly uprooted his buddy (and all of his ensuing shrimp piles) in order to get to know the girl under the hair.

Now whenever I go to the hairdresser's (the same one Greg uses and an old friend of his), I tell her to make my hair "a thing of beauty" since it is so important to the story of me and G.

Just when you think you know all there is to know about your husband, another layer is exposed, and you realize that you may never fully understand his dark and hidden and unplumbed depths.