This weekend, the girls were horrified—horrified!—to learn that it was the fourteen-year anniversary of my first date with Adam.

I suppose it’s a good thing I didn’t mention it was also the anniversary of our first kiss. They might have barfed.

My kids are fakers, though. They actually like it that Adam and I dance with each other in the kitchen. They like it when we hold hands when we’re walking down the sidewalk. They also like hearing about the barrette I was wearing the day I met Adam, a trio of small sunflowers I’d attached to a metal clip, and ask for the story on a regular basis.

“Was it love at first sight?” one of them invariably asks.

Adam, ever the gentleman, insists that it was.

“Was it love at first sight for you too?” they ask me.

And I say no, because at the time, Adam had a really long ponytail and worse, drove a maroon car with a pink door. Also, he had a girlfriend. Deal breakers, every one. Don’t make me rank them.

Anyway, for the next two years, I dated the guy who sat next to Adam in the newsroom where we met.

I did suspect Adam might have an interest in me that went beyond the professional, though. He played pitcher on the company softball team, and at his invitation, I played catcher. Even then, we slipped into an easy routine…pitch, catch, return, repeat.

Back then, I also wanted to learn how to do computer analyses of government databases (I know, I know). Adam, an expert in this, offered to teach me. The idiots running our newspaper said no, thwarting the greatest union of professional nerd minds since Bunson Honeydew and Beaker.

We’d also have lunch together in the company cafeteria pretty regularly, chewing carefully on the sandwiches we’d made from slices of dangerous-looking meat they stored in what looked like a large incubator. Lord knows what they were incubating. Roast beef shouldn’t have a rainbow sheen, right? So maybe they were growing baby leprechauns.

In any event, scientists do say that facing peril together can spark romance. I’m living proof of what scary meat can lead to.

And that’s the only good thing I can say about the roast beef in that particular cafeteria and working in that particular newsroom. It made you face your mortality and pursue what you wanted before your number came up.

Even so, it took three years, two jobs, and two significant haircuts for us to go on that first date. But first, Adam cut off his ponytail, and I cut off mine—all the way down to a spiky buzz cut, teaching me the valuable lesson that one should not break up with a boyfriend and cut her hair in the same week.

At the same time I realized that Adam without a ponytail was very cute, I overheard him telling a colleague of ours that I’d been cuter with long hair. Thus thwarted, we left the newspaper for separate companies, only to wind up together again about a year later, both single, and both with acceptable hairstyles.

Our first date began in a junkyard, where we retrieved the objects of value from the trunk of Adam’s freshly totaled car. Again, the aphrodisiac qualities of peril can’t be underestimated, though it’s possible I felt pity when I agreed to go to a junkyard with him.

After the junkyard, I took Adam to one of my favorite spots, a place I often went running with my dog during a sort of lonely, dateless year.

The spot was a huge, forested park that overlooks a glittering bowl of gray-blue saltwater held tight by a line of snow-covered mountains. I used to peer through the green-black fringe of tree branches reaching over the edge of a cliff and wonder what my life would hold. From where I’d stand, I’d see nothing but beauty.

I think it’s not an accident I took Adam there after he took me to the junkyard. That we could go to both of those places together, and find what was funny and lovely about each, seemed like a good omen.

So did the elderly couple walking hand in hand down the path ahead of us as we were leaving. At the time, I wondered if someday, Adam and I would be those old people, still reaching for each other. I think we will be, even if I don’t want to take anything for granted. If Al and Tipper Gore can call it quits after 40 years, anyone can.

I’m struck by one thing, though, as I think about this anniversary.

As much as calendars help us keep track of upcoming appointments, they also let us look backwards at our lives, marking important things, like first dates and birthdays. I will always know the date of the first time I held Adam’s hand, the first time we kissed. I’ll never know the date of the last time, until that’s passed and I’d give anything for one more opportunity.

Which means that every time I do take his hand, I will try to remember it as something important and wonderful as the first time—even if it makes my kids pretend to barf.