xtcian

ask me, i won't say no, how could i?

8/9/09

Some definitions, according to Lucy:

1. "'Adopting' is when your first family doesn't really work out, but your second one is totally great."
2. "A square bathtub with lots of bubbles is a jacuzzi."
3. "A sunny day with no sun is 'overcast'."
4. "Anniversaries are birthdays for things that aren't people."

I totally jibed with the last one, because today is my and Tessa's anniversary - six years ago, we had a wedding, a party, a rainstorm, benedictions in ancient tongues, and even a jacuzzi full of corn (but that's a whole other story). The benefit of thinking of an anniversary as a birthday is this: it locks in the exact time of year as the unifying factor, not the arbitrary number of years it has been since the event.

In other words, I don't get anything out of the "40th anniversary of Woodstock" or even the anniversary of the release of "Abbey Road". Those are totally arbitrary remembrances based simply on our number system, which was in turn based on the number of fingers we happen to have.

But a birthday? Mine is May 26, and always evokes the beginning of summer, and the warmth of possibility. Lucy's birthday (April 14) always conjures the first blossoms of lilac and cherry trees, and cold nights giving way to gorgeous afternoons. My nephew Barnaby, born on December 15, will know his birthday in the excitement of snow, Christmas shopping and impossibly short days.

And so it is with our anniversary: August 9th, pretty much always the hottest day of the year. I will always associate our wedding with jungle greens, overgrown vines, languid evenings, steamy basketball courts, bats flying overhead during parties, and torrential downpours. I will also remember the date as the best party I've ever known, an assemblage of people so rare and so wonderful that I grow sad to think how hard it would be bring them back together.

But mostly, on this date, I just think how lucky I was to be looking at this woman as I read my vows:

August is a very hard month, that much is clear. No national holidays, a sense of suspended animation, the influx of bizarre weather and a sense that everything takes 45% more effort. And yet, whenever this date comes around, I feel as I felt then: utter clarity as that irrepressibly hot, overcast, unbelievable day filtered into night, and we sang songs by the Smiths, laughed with our favorite people in the universe... then ran, sopping wet, into the rural taxi minivan and let him take us wherever we wanted.