This is our fate, I'm yrs: Wedding edition

A lifetime passes as the 1 train pauses at Times Square.

I've just run from the 7 train hoping hard to board the next swift boat uptown. I've got an appointment to keep and am already thirty minutes late as I catapult my body between the open doors.

A thirty-something man, Clark, ushers his sixties-seventies parents, Paul and Joanne, onto the train. I'm catching my breath and listening to music loud enough for everyone to hear. (Secretly, I always hope my Shuffle lands on "Lick it" by L'il Kim or 1 of 2000 Britney Spears I carry with me.) They stand close to one another for a moment before asking a non-homeless bag lady (Fifth Avenue boutiques represent!) to make room for Paul whose liver spots and creek-like wrinkles show in subway light. We begin to move at last.

Before Paul sits, Joanne kisses him a few times on the cheek.

She holds his hand, steadies him as he sits down. He's not the most fragile older person I've seen on the subway, so I smile as they do this, at the thought of this display of synchronized care as if nobody's watching. Clark smiles too. Then, the man, seated and content, grips his wife's hand, he kisses it, and then she kisses the top of his head.

I stop paying attention to the stations we pass, focus on them. I see love, LOVE, love. For Paul and Joanne, it is clear that this is life, this is everlasting. I see Joanne standing there, holding Paul's hand, and the look of safety, pride, and comfort filling his face. They're sixty or seventy years old; they're a young couple of twenty-five.

I'm writing about this -- a topic more sentimental and warm than anything else I choose to spend words on -- because I have friends who will soon take vows, who will soon forge new bonds based on what they've shared and what they've yet to shape.

For you, I am sending my deep, heartfelt wishes that, when some unsuspecting, skeptic like me sees you in the subway in five, ten, twenty-five years, they'll see Paul and Joanne.