Charles Apple

Yesterday — Saturday — was the 45th birthday of my long-suffering wife, Sharon.

Today — Sunday — we celebrated our 23rd wedding anniversary. She and Elizabeth drove down from Virginia Beach to spend the weekend with me.

The Apple family, three or four years ago
in Williamsburg, Va. Photo by Xinning Huang.
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I had planned a modest blog post about Sharon’s birthday. But I’ve been working so many extra hours at my new job in downtown Charlotte, N.C., that I simply didn’t have time to throw something together.

So, at 10:45 p.m. Sunday night, this is my way of trying to make up for not mentioning Sharon’s big day in my blog.

Sharon is a special education teacher at Landstown Elementary School in Virginia Beach. As soon as she sells our dang-blasted condo, she’ll join me permanently here in Rock Hill, S.C., where we both attended college, where we met, where we returned years later while I worked at the local daily and where we she gave birth to Elizabeth back in 1993.

Born in Oxford, Miss., but raised in Atlanta, Sharon married me in August 1985, three months after she graduated from Winthrop College. Life since then has rarely been dull.

We spent a couple of years in Atlanta, three years in Athens and then about six weeks in Savannah. We then returned to Rock Hill for nearly five years. Shortly after Elizabeth was born, we moved to Raleigh, then to Chicago and then to Des Moines.

I dragged her to Virginia in 2003. I’m hoping this move will be our last for a long, long time.

We moved from Rock Hill to Raleigh not long after
Elizabeth was born in 1993. Now, 15 years later,
we’re moving back.
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Sharon enjoys reading — she’s one of the few people I’ve ever met who reads faster than I do. She watches way too damn much television. Whenever I get her upset she burns off energy by cleaning the house — meaning we have one of the cleanest homes on the Eastern Seaboard.

Most of all, though, Sharon loves animals. She — we — own:

1. A cocker spaniel, Spock. Who, naturally, she brought with her to visit me here in my tiny temporary apartment. Dammit.

2. Two cats, Bones and Oreo.

Oreo. Bones is a little camera-shy.
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3. Four guinea pigs: Mamacita, Rosemary, Cinnamon and Darien.

Back row, left to right: Mamacita, Rosemary and
baby Cinnamon. At the time we took this picture,
Darien–who has his back to you– was named
Ginger. When we discovered that Ginger was a
boy, Sharon tried to rename him Dick. Which tells
you something about Sharon’s sense of humor.
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4. Two turtles: Timothy and Yertle.

5. An assortment of goldfish and other refugees from Long John Silver’s.

And that’s not counting whatever tiny little pets are currently residing on Spock. If you know what I mean.

Sharon shares a birthday with actors Peter O’Toole, Carroll O’Connor and Victoria Jackson, horror director Wes Craven, Pierre Charles L’Enfant, the architect who designed downtown Washington, D.C., and Judge Lance Ito, who presided over the O.J. Simpson trial.

Plus, Saturday was National Ice Cream Sandwich Day. And today was National Watermelon Day. Seriously.

Sharon is a master of delivering
what we call ‘the look.’
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Sharon spent her birthday doing my laundry. She tells me she had literally every machine in the apartment complex tied up Saturday afternoon. It’s not as bad as it sounds, though: I was under orders not to even try to wash my clothes until she returned. Yes, I’m that bad at it.

And then we celebrated our anniversary today by sleeping in late, taking Elizabeth shopping for school supplies and a new keyboard for her iMac and taking Spock for a long walk around the campus where we first met… 26 years ago this October.

Anyway, happy birthday, Sharon, and happy anniversary. Sorry I didn’t get this posted earlier.

But it’s just as well — hardly anyone reads my blog on the weekends.

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