Three Beautiful Things 04-01-2026: What Makes Marriage Fun For Me

 I'm not an April Fool's guy, so these 3BTs are all straight, no pranking. 

1. Here's what makes marriage fun for me.  

I've been going to Spokane the last couple of months to hear classical music concerts -- the Gonzaga Symphony, the Spokane String Quartet, and the Spokane Symphony and I've been attending lectures about the Spokane Symphony concerts presented at the Museum of Arts and Culture in Spokane and an hour before each concert. 

Until Sunday, because Debbie was in either New York or Virginia, she wasn't with me at any of these events. 

Together again, we attended the lectures and Sunday's concert together. I initiated this outing. 

As I wrote earlier this week, after Sunday's concert, Debbie suggested that I be in charge of choosing cultural things for us to do and she'd take charge of travel. 

I happily agreed. 

Two days ago, Debbie was on the Auntie's Bookstore (in Spokane) website and saw that the bookstore supports several book clubs, including one that meets on the first Tuesday of each month at 6 p.m. It's the Science and Nature Book Club. 

Debbie muscled in 🤣🤣 on my gig as the Minister of Culture and suggested we participate in this club on April 7th. 

"That sounds great!" I responded and I could feel that my world was about to expand. 

2. A few years ago, I went on a glorious bender reading books about animals: whales, salmon, beavers, cougars, the octopus, eels, and other more general books about animals. From time to time back in my teaching days I assigned books and readings about the relationship between human beings and nature including Into the Wild and Into Thin Air by John Krakauer and Dan O'Brien's Buffalo for the Broken Heart: Restoring Life to a Black Hills Ranch.  These are all science and nature books. 

I'm stoked for Tuesday. 

The Science and Nature Book Club will be discussing A Natural History of Empty Lots: Field Notes from Urban Edgelands, Back Alleys, and Other Wild Places by Christopher Brown. 

3. My copy arrived today and I dove right in. Christopher Brown is a keen observer of animals, birds, reptiles, plants, trees, and, well, in short, the natural world and now has written this book about natural wildlife in crummy neglected empty lots and other places in Austin, TX you wouldn't think of as sites to marvel at nature.  He built a house on one of these empty lots near an industrial park and began to observe all the wildlife activity around him in urban areas one might call wastelands or urban edgelands. 

I'm not even a hundred pages in and I've learned more about feral parakeets, mesquite trees, coyotes, hawks, egrets, herons, an array of wildflowers, the history of empty lots, and more than I had ever known before. And that's just for starters. 

My world has, indeed, expanded in invigorating and unexpected ways. 

I hope what you see in this post is that without me, Debbie never would have heard the symphony lectures we attended nor the Sunday concert and without Debbie, I would never have considered this book club nor this book. 

It makes marriage fun.