Ten

I can hardly believe it’s been a whole decade since that magical day when I married my best friend. Here’s what I remember from that day: A whole host of things going wrong, running late, not going to plan, my nervous pulse hammering past disappointment and frustration to panic. The pure calm that settled over me in the empty chapel once I finally saw my husband to be. My father walking me down the aisle, the encouraging push he gave me at the end. Gentle laughter when the pastor read a bit of text too long for me to repeat in one go. The warmth of good friends crowded into a limousine. A tiny cup of velvet butternut squash soup and a buttery square of a brie grilled cheese sandwich that tasted like heaven. Poems on every table that tried but didn’t quite express the love that had subsumed me. Being carried on a tide of joy and love and laughter and, okay, too much tequila, the waves of happiness cresting and cresting and never breaking. Good music – are the stars out tonight? I don’t know if it’s cloudy or bright – and loud singing. Looking out the window to see snowflakes as delicate as butterflies form a kaleidoscope of white and the mountains, resplendent in their shimmering robes, presiding in the background. Magic.

But the wedding day was just a day. Just a party. A wonderful day I will never forget. But in the intervening years, there’s been a marriage. If we’re lucky, just the beginning.

We’ve been so very fortunate, these ten years. (And the seven years leading up to our marriage!) Our ups have been high, our downs have been pretty high as well. I have no doubt that we have sorrow in our future; that’s just the way life goes. But for now, I am so grateful for these wonderful, busy, happy ten years.

I tend to get gooey and overly sentimental about our anniversary (okay, about all things). My husband – logical, practical, scientific – is my counterweight. So in his honor, I am going to try to rein in the goo and aim for goofy instead.

Top Ten Great Things About My Husband

(Well, maybe not the top ten)

Okay, so he’s kind, thoughtful, brilliant, hard-working, funny, great father, supportive of my hopes and dreams, blah blah blah… But ALSO:

1. Maybe he’s not a big fan of washing dishes, but he is almost always willing to do the laundry and he is SO GOOD AT FOLDING.
2. He is a master at the art of choosing the perfect ridiculous gif to text me and make me laugh in the middle of the day.
3. He and I may sometimes disagree – and disagree strongly – but he is always willing to listen to logical arguments, and often comes around to my side.
4. He says, “Thank you for making dinner” every single night, even if what I’ve made is barely edible.
5. He can hear an interesting snippet of music underneath the din of a thousand Target shoppers on a Saturday and know exactly how to find out which song it is and then play it in the car until it is our new favorite family song. He did that with Guster’s “Satellite” – which he identified in a noisy restaurant in Ithaca, and which has become one of my favorite songs. Bonus: I think of him and that trip together every time I hear it.
6. He is super warm and snuggly which is very useful when I have just climbed into a freezing cold bed. But his feet are always icy, which comes in handy when I’ve gotten overheated by being pressed up against him, and he’s always willing to clamp his frosty toes against my calves.
7. He may not be a flowers-and-jewelry-and-love-notes romantic, but he listens, and sometimes I will find myself marveling, “He is doing this solely because it is important to me.” Like addressing and stamping all of our holiday cards, when he thinks they are a waste of time and money. If that’s not romance, I don’t know what is.
8. Speaking of romance, he loves to choose my next book for me to read. Almost always, it’s something I end up LOVING.
9. He is happy to plan all of our travel together – airline, hotel, restaurant, museum, everything – which is great because just doing a single search on Kayak makes me break out in hives.
10. He keeps getting hotter. I am serious. The older he gets, the more handsome he is.

Of course there are a billion other reasons why I love him, from the frivolous to the serious, the silly to the sentimental. You pile up quite a lot of love in a decade.  But above all, I am still so very glad we chose each other.

 

 

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Thursday Randomosity: Mainly Short Bullets and One Really Long Bullet Edition

It’s been a long, cold week filled with much snow. So let’s get straight to the bullets!

* Every time I hear a Rhianna song – any Rhianna song at all – I get the Shy Ronnie chorus stuck in my head.

* Tomorrow I get to attend a fancy holiday party! I am going to wear a fancy dress and some high heels and maybe even some makeup. I have yet to decide whether I will wear stockings. The dress is short, and it will be cold outside, so it seems that stocking are A Good Idea… And yet, I will be wearing peep-toe shoes (which are NOT up for negotiation), and I think it might be some sort of fashion faux pas to wear stockings with peep-toes. Am I wrong? Has the “no stockings with peep-toe shoes” rule gone the way of “no white pants after Labor Day”? (Although I still refrain from wearing white pants after Labor Day, or before Labor Day, to be absolutely honest with you. White pants + generous thighs = giant inescapable microscope on the part of me I least want people to look at.)

* There is something wrong with our local Macy’s. First of all, it’s a stand-alone Macy’s, which is odd to me. In my experience, a Macy’s is usually one of the anchor stores in a mall. But that’s not the main problem. The main problem is that the Macy’s employs approximately four people.

I went there twice last weekend. Once, on the way to dinner at a friend’s house. We wanted to pick up a little hostess gift. We got to the Macy’s about 40 minutes before we had to be at dinner. Our friend’s house was 10 minutes away. (This is beginning to sound like a horrible nightmare of a math problem.) We grabbed a cute package of Frango mints after poking around for five minutes and realized we still had tons of time. So I moseyed into the shoe section where I spotted a cute pair of boots I wanted to try on. I stood there for about three minutes without seeing a single shoe salesperson, so we scrapped that idea and headed immediately to the cashier. If you’re keeping track, that means we had 22 whole minutes to buy the mints and leave.

First of all, we wandered around for about 5 minutes before we found a sales counter that actually had a person at it.

(Let me remind you: This was a Saturday evening two weeks after Thanksgiving.)

Then we found a cashier who was helping one person. Apparently, someone was in line behind that person. Her pile of costume jewelry was holding her place. Which was fine with me – I know the holidays make people crazy, and I can be patient when necessary. My husband, on the other hand, sometimes has a hard time. (Which is weird, because he is INCREDIBLY patient with me. But lines or bad traffic get to him really quickly.) Turns out that these two customers each took FOREVER. My husband even scouted out the rest of the store to see if he could find us an alternate sales counter. He could not.

We got out of there 5 minutes late. As in, it took us 22 minutes to make one tiny purchase.

The next day, we went back so I could try on the boots. There were about 40,000 women in the tiny shoe area and just two people to do all the running and ringing up. It took me 15 minutes to wait in line to have the shoe salesman look at the boots I wanted to try on, and then go in the back to get them. He got so confused, poor guy, that he brought back only two of the three pairs I wanted to try on… And one of them in the size of the girl behind me in line. (I let her try them on while I tried on the other pair.)

It was a mess.

I wonder if that Macy’s just can’t afford to hire enough holiday employees? Or if a bunch of the employees were in the back eating birthday cake? Or if it’s just a really bad combination of slow and/or new employees and excess numbers of customers.

All I have to say is I have renewed appreciation for Zappos.

* I found a Giant Dead Spider and a Tiny Dead Spider in the guest bathtub. I now get creeped out every time I go into the guest bathroom, because the tub is apparently some sort of Final Resting Ground for arachnids. And that is creepy.

* The other day, my husband bought some chestnuts and roasted them in the oven. They are too mealy for my taste. But it felt very festive just to be near them while they were roasting. I suppose it would have been MORE festive if they’d involved some sort of open fire. More festive and also more fire alarm-y.

* Speaking of not-actually-festive things, our apartment complex put up a lovely “happy holidays” notice in all the hallways and stairwells. When you first spot it, you think, “How nice of the administration to get into the holiday spirit!” Until you read it. And then you find out that it is a strongly-worded note forbidding live Christmas trees. After all, live trees are the primary cause of fires in December. Then it ends with asking us to spy on our neighbors and report them if they buy a real tree.

Listen, I am all for Fire Safety. Really, I am. And I am all for requiring that renters buy fake trees. It’s for the Good of the Many, people! But isn’t there a better and less fear mongering sort of way to do it?

* When my husband started residency, he got three white coats. Long white coats, which differentiate the Real Doctors from the Medical Students.  That is one white coat per year, if you’re counting.

Here we are, not yet halfway through the second year of residency, and my husband’s second white coat just bit the dust. His pen exploded in the pocket.

In case you don’t know, Giant Blue Ink Stain + White Coat = Noticeable Problem.

Note to self: Do not use Shout Spray on a Giant Ink Stain.

Second Note to Self: Do not dunk the Now Enormously Huge Yet Slightly Diluted Ink Stain in water.

Third Note to Self: Do not try to Oxy out the Now Astronomically Monstrous Ink Stain That Is Still Spreading and Threatening to Eat Your Face and just throw it away while you’re still alive.

The other white coat is serviceable, but is missing all of its buttons.

* Here’s where I admit to you that I do not know how to sew on a button. While I know this makes a small part of my mother (jokingly) think she failed me as a parent, it has really not hindered my progress as a human in the least. One time a button fell off my coat in college. I was able to get one of the guys who lived upstairs from my dorm room to sew it back on for me.

I guess what I’m saying is, if you can’t teach your kids to sew, at least teach them how to persuade an Econ major into sewing for them. That’s got to be a skill of equal value.

* Facebook felt the need to remind me that my wedding anniversary to “[Husband’s Name Here]” is coming up.

It makes me deeply sad to think that this probably HELPS people remember their anniversaries.

* That said, it’s our anniversary!!! We plan to celebrate by going out to a steak dinner. Because nothing says “I will love you for all eternity” like stuffing yourself silly with meat, amIright?

We’ve been together for so long that it kind of surprises me that we’ve only been married two years. Why, we’re still newlyweds!

The newness of “being married” has worn off, for the most part. But every once in a while, I am struck with wonderment that I am bonded to my husband for life.

It’s a pretty crazy thing, that we found each other. Crazy and wonderful.

* * *

What’s up with you today, Internet?

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Getting Married? You Must Read This

One of my lovely readers emailed me for some wedding advice.

Okay, in all actuality, she said something like, “I’m getting married in 23 days! If you have any last minute advice, I would love to hear it!”

Which is not technically the same thing as asking for advice… But I’ll take it!

If you are engaged or have been married, I’m sure you’ve heard all the mushy-gushy advice, like “Remember that this day is about the marriage, not the wedding,” and “Even if things go wrong, you’ll still think your wedding day is the best day of your life” and “Don’t get all worked up about minor things.”

Blah blah blah. I mean, it’s all true, and I tried really really hard to follow that advice. (Especially the part about not letting the small things get to you. Like the fact that our cake was crooked. And someone-who-will-not-be-named did not program our first-dance song into the iPod. And someone-else-who-will-not-be-named made us late for photos.)

In fact, let’s not go there. Because the day WAS wonderful, and at the end I was married to my best friend. (Plus, if I start thinking about the little things that went wrong? I get upset and my face gets all squinchy and I REALLY do not need extra wrinkles thank you very much.)

Of course, when I responded to my nearly-married bloggy reader, I gave her some of the sappy advice. The advice that most worked for me, which was to remember to pause throughout the wedding day, to take in my feelings and all the details so that it wouldn’t all blur together in my memory.

It worked. I remember how my nerves were buzzing like an electric fence until that first moment I saw my husband. I remember how my mom’s hands trembled just a little bit as she helped me don my (clip-on) earrings. I remember the nervous tremor in my friend’s voice as she read the passage from History of Love during the ceremony. I remember listening to my pastor’s voice during the sermon, looking out the window of the chapel into the snow and the fading sunlight, squeezing the hand of this man who was minutes away from being my husband, and feeling my body fill up with love and light and pure joy.

Ahem.

Anyway. That’s the sappy side of the wedding day. Believe me, I love the sappy side of things. I am The Queen of Sap.

But I wanted to give some additional advice.

The wedding advice you won’t hear anywhere else. The secret underbelly of wedding advice.

You know you wanna hear it. So here goes…

1. You know, I was going to limit this to gals with strapless dresses. But I’m gonna go ahead and extend it to everyone: Tape your boobs into your dress.

And make sure you do this right away, preferably before the ceremony, but definitely before you try to hug people in the reception line because if you do not? You will flash your father’s best friend. Also? Do it in a bathroom that is not open to every single woman attending your wedding, including your mother in law.

P.S. Duct tape does wonders for “bra overhang” (aka “boob fat”).

2. Designate a specific person to help you go to the bathroom. Prior to the wedding. That way, you will not end up in a tiny stall with four different people throughout the night, including but not limited to your mother and your father’s business partner. (His business partner is a woman, just to put your mind at ease. She is also a Medical Professional. But that made it no less embarrassing for me to tinkle as she crouched there beside me, covered in the many layers of silk-satin and tulle that she was holding away from the loo.)

3. No matter how much you like garlic, do not eat a bowl full of pasta covered in crushed garlic and mushrooms at your reception. Trust me. You do a LOT of kissing and hugging and dancing and talking at those reception thingys. And you do NOT want to forever be known as The Bride Who Breathes Garlic Fire.

4. Likewise, no matter how much you enjoy a good tequila shot, do not allow your wedding party to ply you with P@tron shooters all night. Despite the fact that you may inexplicably NOT get drunk, your father will never ever ever let you live down the fact that half of the open bar bill went to high-end tequila.

5. If you are a modest person? Just go ahead and elope. Because not only will:

a. All your bridesmaids watch you shove your nude, shivering body into your dress…

b. Your father’s best friend accidentally see your boobs whilst you are trying to give him a hug…

c. Your wedding planner manhandle your boobs into about half a roll of duct tape…

d. Your mother-in-law and several of her friends walk in on said boob-wrangling…

e. Your mother, maid of honor, college roommate, and father’s business partner listen to you tinkle from about eight inches away…

But also, your brand new husband will have to UN-TAPE YOU at the end of the night. If that’s not romantic, then I don’t know what is.

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All right, all you married folks. What is your number one piece of wedding (not marriage) advice?

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