As the song says: “Don’t it always seem to go that you don’t know what you got ‘til it’s gone?”

Am I talking about the pad thai at this restaurant, the one in Savannah where we used to go?

How it was perfectly warming and wholesome with hints of sour acidity.

Am I sentimental about the pad thai? Or am I talking about who we were back then?

Watching the tourists go by, sitting at a wooden table in a window. Splitting a medium-spicy plate (only $12), drops of a sweet sauce making the table sticky. Finding “our” place (not his or hers) in a new city, just the two of us.

As we reach 15 years of marriage, it’s all different now. The pad thai at our current local place (300 miles away) is more robust and soy sauce-heavy, darker and richer— but thank God for those newlyweds. And for the citrusy pad thai of their young lives. Where would we be without them?

It was a hard, wonderful, poor, silly, magnificent, romantic, incredible time to be alive.

[photos: Ruan Thai, Jan 2025, back at one of our old “regular” restaurants from when we were first married]