You know you have been married a long time when...

Last evening Bill and I went out for dinner to celebrate his 67th birthday. He was upstairs getting ready to go, when it occurred to me that there was something I wanted to talk to him about. I also needed to use the bathroom, so I thought I would multi-task by using the upstairs bathroom and talking simultaneously.

When I arrived in the upstairs bathroom, I discovered that he was occupying the porcelain throne.

I said, "I was going to talk to you while you got ready, but..."

Guessing what I was about to say, he said, "Oh, you needed to use the toilet too."

Turning to leave, I replied, "I'll just go use the other bathroom."

Then thinking I had come up with a clever line, "Hmmm....maybe we should..."

He burst out in laughter when I was only three words into my punch line.

"Do you know what I was going to say?"

Still laughing, "Yes!"

"Seriously....you knew I was going to say that maybe we should remodel the bathroom and put in adjacent toilets?"

"Yup."

Now that seems to me to be a pretty random comment. So, you know you have been married a long time when your husband laughs at your joke before you have even gotten it out of your mouth.

When we were young, we used to get in the bathtub together and have great discussions in which we pondered our own problems and those of the world.

Now that we are old, we apparently are both picturing ourselves on adjacent toilets working out our own problems and those of the world.

Perhaps this isn't such an off-the-wall idea. When I was a kid, I had friends who lived on farms that still had outhouses. Most of these seemed to have two adjacent holes in the bench seat.

So when some home designer comes up with the notion that having two toilets in the bathroom is simultaneously both innovative and retro, remember you read it here first.

In other words, to borrow the phraseology of a currently popular ad, "I'm an old lady, and adjacent toilets were my idea."