Thank you, Ms.

I'm no expert on marriage, or love. But, it seems to me that our American divorce rate might be lower if we spent more time finding new things to love about our spouses, and less time wishing they'd be "the person I fell in love with." I'm amazed by the moments when I learn something new about Sarah that I never knew in spite of my best efforts to have an open and honest relationship. What's better is when this "something new" comes by surprise and is mildly humorous.

Sarah and I went out on a date last weekend — sweeper and a movie. We dropped our Little Man off at my parents, who were happy to receive him; then went to Best Buy to get a new vacuum; then to see Slumdog Millionaire at the near-by Castleton Mall. Our vacuum purchase took less time than expected, so if we went straight to the theater we would have been forced to read the same Coca-Cola sponsored trivia slides 3 or 4 times over. We had too little time to go into Borders and have Sarah risk losing me in the media and literature labyrinth; I tend to wander when I'm not wearing my leash. So, we jointly agreed that going straight to the theater would be best.

As we approached the cinema Sarah said to me, "Does this theater have an arcade?" That's strange, I thought. Does she want me to try and grab a stuffed Spongebob from the claw game as a surprise for Simeon?

"I assume so," I replied. "Most theaters do these days. Why?"

"Well, do you think they have Pac-Man?," she said.

Pac-Man?, I thought, still confused by her line of questioning. "Why do you want to know if there is Pac-Man?"

"Sometimes I just like to play Pac-Man."

Who is this woman? I think I love her.

I cupped my hands, put them to my brow and pressed my face to the window to see if there were any joysticks present. If I were to be her hero, I would find Pac-Man and deliver him to her.

But no, there was no Pac-Man, "but there is Ms. Pac-Man!" Would she receive this as good news? Is Ms. Pac-Man an acceptable substitute for the original? Turns out, it is.

"Oh good, I want to play." She didn't use a deep breathy voice and bat her eyelashes at me, but I sure imagined she did. This was a lot to wrap my mind around, because the last time I played Pac-Man, I thought girls had cooties.

We bought our movie tickets and headed straight to the arcade. Tokens. We had to have tokens. Sarah rifled through her purse and pulled out a dollar bill, "oh, that won't work." She knew you had to have a crisp dollar bill to get game tokens.  "Here. Try this one." It wasn't perfectly crisp, but it worked; four game tokens clinked into the tray! Sarah popped in two tokens (can you believe Ms. Pac-Man costs 50 cents?) and hit the "start" button.

She used her whole body to navigate the maze and gobble up Power Pellets while the ghosts gave chase. When her three lives were up, she scrambled for two more tokens to continue her conquest. After each passed stage, she said with bright eyes, "I've never made it this far before." And with each passed level, I fell more in love. 

I can't quite explain why I got so excited about this revelation, other than to say that learning something new about Sarah, even a seemingly insignificant "something", is something I hope I'm always excited about.