State of California

GOVERNOR'S OFFICE

SACRAMENTO 95814

RONALD REAGAN

GOVERNOR

My Darling Wife

This note is to warn you of a diabolical plot entered into by some of our so called friends - (ha!) calendar makers and even our own children. These and others would have you believe we've been married 20 years.

20 minutes maybe - but never 20 years. In the first place it is a known fact that a human cannot sustain the high level of happiness I feel for more than a few minutes - and my happiness keeps increasing. 

I will confess to one puzzlement but I'm sure it is just some trick perpetrated by our friends - (Ha again!) I can't remember ever being without you and I know I was born more than 20 mins ago.

Oh well - that isn't important. The important thing is I don't want to be without you for the next 20 years, or 40, or however many there are. I've gotten very used to being happy and I love you very much indeed.

Your Husband of 20 something or other.

Nuit de Noël, 1963 

by Malick Sidibé

Cologne circa 1956

If she is important enough to you, you will find a way.

If she’s not, you will find an excuse.

“I can’t think of any greater happiness than to be with you all the time, without interruption, endlessly, even though I feel that here in this world there’s no undisturbed place for our love, neither in the village nor anywhere else; and I dream of a grave, deep and narrow, where we could clasp each other in our arms as with clamps, and I would hide my face in you and you would hide your face in me, and nobody would ever see us any more.” - Franz Kafka  

"A woman has got to love a bad man once or twice in her life to be thankful for a good one." - Elizabeth Taylor 

Happy Halloween everyone!!

"Do you think I'm wonderful? she asked him one day as they leaned against the trunk of a petrified maple. No, he said. Why? Because so many girls are wonderful. I imagine hundreds of men have called their loves wonderful today, and it's only noon. You couldn't be something that hundreds of others are." - Jonathan Safran Foer, Everything is Illuminated

People always say that, when you love someone, nothing in the world matters. But that's not true, is it? You know, and I know, that when you love someone, everything in the world matters a little but more." - Jodi Picoult

“I will love you until the chances of us running into one another slip from slim to zero, and until your face is fogged by distant memory.” - Lemony Snicket, Beatrice Letters 

“You know what’s wrong with you, Miss Whoever-you-are? You’re chicken, you’ve got no guts. You’re afraid to stick out your chin and say, “Okay, life’s a fact, people do fall in love, people do belong to each other, because that’s the only chance anybody’s got for real happiness.” You call yourself a free spirit, a “wild thing,” and you’re terrified somebody’s gonna stick you in a cage. Well baby, you’re already in that cage. You built it yourself. And it’s not bounded in the west by Tulip, Texas, or in the east by Somali-land. It’s wherever you go. Because no matter where you run, you just end up running into yourself.”

The greatest thing you'll ever learn is just to love and be loved in return. - Moulin Rouge