Tracy and I got married - after 16 years

Tracy and I met 16 years ago when I was waiting for a Peace Corps assignment and she was about to put in an application to Peace Corps. So we had a great initial conversation and hit it off pretty well. We were both sponsors for a church youth group, which is where we first ran into each other. She was a successful sales manager and I had a new MBA that I wanted to use in some poor country to do small business development and be like the Ugly American in the book.
Since then a lot has happened. I did the Peace Corps, did hurricane relief after Mitch, trained Peace Corps volunteers, then went to work for a relief and development NGO. Tracy moved to Texas and became a school teacher. She got more liberal and I got more conservative. Not a modern-day conservative but more of an old-fashioned pay-off-your-fiscal-debt, invest-in-infrastructure, leave-some- for-the-grandchildren and only-start-wars-you-absolutely-have-to kind of conservative.
Last year some of Tracy's students started reading about Darfur and wanted to learn what they could do about it, so she remembered she knew somebody who used to do stuff like that and gave me a call.
My mother answered the phone. My mother has COPD and so I'm looking after her these days. They were both glad to reconnect but my mother didn't have enough breath to stay on the phone long. She told Tracy to call back later.
Anyhow, blah blah blah. We eloped to Arkansas two weeks ago. We told everybody we were eloping instead of inviting family and friends from all over the country and elsewhere to get together, especially with both of us having parents and other family members who are no longer so mobile as they once were. We tallied up what everybody would have spent getting together plus what we would have spent on a big wedding and it added up to about what a small house is worth. We decided we'd rather not ask everybody to blow their money.While we were taking pictures in the haunted Crescent Hotel in Eureka Springs, a ghostly orb posed with us in this picture. We took it as a friendly gesture and are not sure yet if it followed us home. We already have two cats and two big dogs. The more the merrier.


Jo and her husband Dave helped us elope.