Retired Relics and Infinite Love

January 2025

I retired this wallet today. I got it roughly two years after "Pulp Fiction" came out. So, believe it or not, this most assuredly non-licensed billfold of questionable origins has been with me for almost 30 years. I understand that it’s an odd thing for a fifty-something-year-old man to be carting around, but that's not the crux of this story.

While cleaning it out, I rediscovered a set of photobooth shots of Kara and me tucked away in its recesses. I immediately remembered when and where they were taken -during a pub crawl on one of our first trips to Olympia after moving to Whiskey Jane. I placed them in my wallet the next day.

However, there was something in between them that I’d never noticed before. An "A + K" mini-doodle that was stuck to the back of one of the photos. Which was quite unexpected, though hardly a mystery.

Having melded itself to a photo, the doodle had clearly been there for a while. If I had to guess, I’d say just about as long as the black and white snapshots it lived between, so roughly five years. And though I wasn’t responsible for and had no prior knowledge of its placement, the origin story wasn’t hard to surmise. Some random night shortly after the trip to Olympia, Kara set up the coffee for her early-rising partner, sketched out a doodle, and snuck it between the photos in his wallet while he slept.

The doodles were a regularity, though she typically left them next to the coffee machine or on the nightstand. Only this one she hid in my wallet for me to someday discover. Which would be a very Kara-like thing to do.

So here I am today, a handful of years later, with a wonderful reminder that love is infinite and has a peculiar way of tapping you on the shoulder when you least expect it. This made me smile, and the fact that the find produced warm fuzzies instead of sadness made me smile even broader.