Ten Good Years

Where were you, Gentle Reader, ten years ago today?

Most of you were helping me get married.

Well, many of you. I don’t know how many Gentle Readers there actually are, but of those who comment, now and then, I’m pretty sure more than half were in that room. Not that I remember it, but my Best Reader and I were looking at the pictures this morning, and there you were. You seem to have been having a good time.

So do I. Although, as I say, I don’t remember much of it. We lit a candle for unity and snuffed out our individual lives; I remember that. I remember that it was raining, and then it wasn’t, and then it was again; we moved the reception inside and seemed to continue having a good time. My Best Reader was beautiful; I remember that, but it was nice to see it in the photographs. And y’all were young. So young.

For those of you who weren’t there at the time, well, I’m sorry you missed it. We had funeral parlor fans printed up, for people to wave; they weren’t needed for the heat, in the event, but people amused themselves with them anyway. There were children running around, evidently; they seem very small in the photographs, almost unrecognizable from the big kids I know. The cake was pretty, and also tasty to the best of my recollection, and it’s too bad that Sweet Daddy Bakery (in lovely Wayne, PA) is no longer around. And there were lots and lots and lots of roses.

The thing about this moment, ten years (give or take an hour) from signing the ketubah and being pronounced man and wife by a nice old Marryin’ Sam, is that for all it’s a magnificent anniversary, well worth remembering, celebrating and commemorating, it is just a moment. It did, for a long time, divide our lives together into before the wedding and after the wedding. One of those pivots, it looked like, a major landmark, when Everything Changes. Now, having spent some time this morning looking at the photos, and some more time, since the box was open, looking at some other photos, it looks less like that. Oh, it’s a Big Deal, don’t get me wrong. But it’s possible for me to look at a photo of my Best Reader and not know whether it was from Before or After the wedding. Or, particularly, care. We have had ten good years of marriage. Before that, we had eight good years of cohabitation, and before that four good years of friendship.

And the moment, thinking about it, that Everything Changed (or rather, one of them, since the most Changy of the moments was when we bumped up a generation and started being parents)— the moment that Everything Changed was not the moment that we exchanged promises and become husband and wife, in the eyes of the state, our family and friends, and (one hopes) the Divine, but some earlier moment when we realized that we wanted to make those promises. And fulfill them. Which, thank the Divine, we are still working on.

Then why this mawkish and unusually personal blog note? Because, Gentle Reader, while that earlier moment may have been the real moment when Everything Changed, it was not the moment for publicly commemorating that change. That was ten years ago, more or less now. I think; I don’t really remember. But there are pictures.

And then, this moment is another moment for that public commemoration. And, just as ten years ago, it required a room full of family and friends to properly do the job, I was thinking that this morning it requires you, Gentle Reader, whether you were there at the time or not, to make this a commemoration of that moment when we exchanged the vows, of the earlier moment when we chose to do so, and of all the time since that we’ve been working at them.

And of all the time ahead for working at them some more. We still, my Best Reader and I, propose marriage to each other. Probably three or four times a week. Sometimes, and don’t tell anyone this, we dance, in the kitchen, while the kids are wrecking the living room.

Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.