Today is our anniversary.
And a so-called round anniversary at that.
No, not parsley
which is twelve and a half.
(yes, I know, but believe it or not,
Germans,
as apparently the only ones in the world,
I sincerely hope,
celebrate 12 1/2 by tacking a pound and a half of parsley on the bride
with a hatpin the size of a small sword.
And if you wonder where Dr Who got the idea for the celery boutoniere…)
So back to the anniversary.
Which also isn’t aluminum
(thirty-seven and a half.)
And what exactly does that mean?
A box of aluminum foil?
the wing off a plane?
One of those aluminum pots
which can’t be used in a micro.
And which supposedly causes Alzheimer’s.
(So you can’t remember how many dishes you have washed in the last …..years?)
Not that it’s about things.
Well, sometimes it’s about things.
Like the famous toothpaste tube cap.
But mostly,
It’s about memories.
Like washing dishes.
After a party with forty friends.
And singing at the top of your lungs
while your husband sleeps the sleep of the host who keeps up with his guests in cups of the good stuff.
But it is also about cups of tea,
served, if you are lucky,
by a naked butler,
named Harald,
when you are too exhausted to get out of bed.
Or are celebrating a special remembrance day
with the good tea you dragged back from a trip to London.
Which reminds you each time you brew
of the bizarre little things that make up a marriage.
Like a huge lightning storm in a park where you took shelter in a tea room
and almost drowned in the stuff,
good as it was,
while trying to wait out the storm.
Working an extra concert you don’t really want to do
to pay for a present for a fifth anniversary.
Or taking a walk in the snow,
trying a shortcut,
and being chased through waist-high snow
by huge German shepherds
the dogs, not the people,
although the others also exist,
as you try to climb a fence to get out of a lumber yard
before the dogs make wood pulp out of you.
Or all the funerals,
and operations,
and cheap vacations as students
that turned out to be pure gold in the memory department,
and drew you both closer over the years.
And the math conferences where you are seated by languages you speak
and end up confused in six languages at the same time
because you don’t know the French for a Cauchy sequence.
Or the concerts, concerts, concerts.
In freezing churches,
freezing cathedrals,
over-heated halls,
standing in front of a huge majestic altar in long ski underwear,
(under floor-length black, of course)
since you are standing on an air vent leading to the unheated catacombs,
and hoping against hope you get done in time before something down there decides to explode.
Or one of the bishop’s hats (with skull)
drops on you.
Interesting, exotic, bizarre, weird,
sometimes tedious,
often at the edge of my strength,
but
all in all,
I think I’d do it all again.
Happy anniversary, love.
copyright Dunnasead.co 2016
Quahog on a Tightrope 