Questions Sixty-Seven And Sixty-Eight

That song by Chicago, where the nearest I can tell questions sixty-seven and sixty-eight are: "Can this lovin' we have found within us (Oooh) suddenly exist between? Did we somehow try to make it happen ? (Oooh) was it just a natural thing?" That last one might be question seventy, but it might just be a rhetorical rejoinder.
If you stay in one place long enough, things fall apart. This is inevitable and it is described by second law of thermodynamics. The pessimist in me looks at the car we've been driving for ten years and sees the carpet turning gray and the chunk of molding that is taped on next to the fuse box. Then I stop and think about the amazing dependability of the vehicle we call "Ralphie", our Golden Buffalo of a Saturn station wagon. It's too easy to discard things that need work, but the satisfaction gained in keeping them running is far more impressive.
The biggest challenge of maintaining a relationship of more than six weeks is keeping it fresh. So many of the things that used to be magic are now well rehearsed, or simply refrains. I wonder what it took to make me stop our car, the one that came before the one that came before the one we drive today, on the side of the road and waltz with my wife-to-be. I wonder what tricks I might still have carefully hidden up my sleeve. It's all so very familiar.
And then I remember: Familiarity doesn't have to breed contempt. It can buy you freedom, and the forgiveness of missing a few wide right, just as long as when the game is on the line you knock it straight through the goalposts. It allows you to use sports metaphors to describe the romantic missteps of a man who sometimes forgets just how happy he really is. The real trick, it seems, is to remember those questions, and don't forget the parenthetical "oooh"s that go in between.