At work we discovered a “37” club, a few of us who anticipated our 37^th wedding anniversaries this year and, for a couple of us, this month. Mine’s today. So’s my wife’s.

Naturally enough, I reached for Robert Browning’s words, written in the headline above, which I may have learned first in Miss Sheehan’s senior English class in high school — now that was a woman with staying power — but certainly at least by 1975, with the release of “Love Among the Ruins,” made for TV and starring Katharine Hepburn and Laurence Olivier. The female lead misses the line’s origin and the poet’s name but no one else ever does — you can find the line on dishrags and wall hangings everywhere. Or you might find the poet’s reference in the name of the movie itself, which is the title of a Robert Browning poetry collection. Browning still wears well at a couple of hundred years old, though I don’t know much about him.

So does his beloved wife, six years his senior, who was brilliant and prolific and was much more of a name than he was when they married. He was living at home when they courted, probably not in the basement, but you get the idea.

Elizabeth Barrett was a cougar of sorts, not easy for a woman in failing health and likely with a medication habit. But the marriage did both of them well, and included a son born in her 40s. She died at 55, so she never saw old, at least by my standard. I remember 55 fondly, though distantly.

But this is about my wife — remember her? It’s our anniversary — and about Browning’s words, “Grow old along with me! The best is yet to be, the last of life, for which the first was made,” which ring true now as they never could have in English class or even in the movie, which I’d have sworn I saw with my wife but it was televised the year before we met.

Unlike Browning, I didn’t live in my parents’ basement then but made the princely sum of $175 a week. That’s what grad school could do for you. Like Elizabeth, my wife was older than me — two years, though I seldom mention this — and considerably more accomplished. So I was an unlikely suitor but a calculating one; if I waited longer, I reckoned, she’d be gone. Browning did not have that problem.

Really, no one wants to grow old but “That last of life” thing is what my bride and I have come to appreciate. Thirty-seven years was a blur, accelerated with four births, four childhoods, four graduations, four weddings. And now, two grandchildren.

That treasure in that “last of life” phase — OK, the end is not imminent but we’re gliding past middle age (Carey got the “big flu shot” this year) — has become apparent like it never was in our younger years. We loved those kids’ ballgames but now we stretch out on the sofa instead and watch British detective shows. That’s cool, too. Our money goes into savings accounts — finally! — and this anniversary celebration included gumbo (easy on the teeth) at Feezo’s, afternoon Mass in Lafayette, and, yes, flu shots. Two, please: One for the lady. Beat that for romance.

Or beat these, for wise words: “Our times are in his hand who saith, ‘A whole I planned, youth shows but half’; Trust God: See all, nor be afraid.”

Still Browning, but it’s too long to fit on a dishrag. So we hold it in our hearts, instead.

Ken Stickney is editor of The Port Arthur News.