Music for possibly the weirdest wedding anniversary ever

This wedding anniversary did not turn out as planned. 

Maybe I'll tell you about it later.  

Nuthin' tragic.  

Certainly educational.

Meanwhile, Canada Day is bearing down upon us - it promises some weirdness as well - so I offer this dreamy ditty from Toronto-born Abigail Lapell. Everywhere we go, you know everyone, people say hello/ Every time you call our song starts playing, on the radio /

Has it been a year or two?  Will it be cotton or leather? 

Mercury and iron, carbon, silver, bind us together/ 

Diamonds are a dime a dozen, take my hand/ Take my hand and don’t stop running

Happy anniversary, one more year/ Frozen in amber, for eternity /Oh darling, oh my dear 

Has it been a year or two? Will it be cotton or leather? 

Mercury and iron, carbon, silver, bind us togethеr, together

Everywhеre we go, you know everyone (Happy anniversary)/ People say hello (One more year, frozen in amber) 

Every time you call our song starts playing (For eternity, oh darling oh my dear)/On the radio

Fault lines

 

I've never sat down and counted the number of anniversaries the Resident Fan Boy has missed, but it's probably at least a quarter of the available ones.  It's not always his fault.

This one is; he's spending it in London, Ontario, of all places, under a heat dome.  He sent me a view from his hotel window; it looks exactly like the view from the St Laurent Transitway station in Hades. Here in Victoria, the June weather this year has been cool and temperate. -- his loss.

Anyway, I got a text from my Friend of the Right Hand, offering to drop over over with some ginger loaves.  It turned out the RFB had sneakily persuaded her to deliver some roses, seeing as this anniversary is one of those ending in 5.

A tolerance for pain

When this is over - if it's ever over - there are some things I will miss.

Here's one of them. One of the most joyous pop-songs I've heard about falling in love. It's from the musical Hamilton, and this "lockdown" version features features the original cast, among others.

The Resident Fan Boy and I just celebrated a major wedding anniversary with a zero on the end, so this is as good a time as any.

The case against clairvoyance

The Resident Fan Boy and I are trembling on the brink of another major wedding anniversary -- but not this year. Next year.

I post a wedding photo on Facebook each June, in part to preserve photos on the internet, so I decided that this year, not being a major anniversary, but a sizeable one - they get bigger annually - I should skip the usual ones of bride and groom, and go for a shot of the guests.

I chose "before-and-after" shots of the moment that I, having been made to turn my back, threw my bouquet. In the first, the single ladies, all either born in the same year as me, or just a couple of years before or after, are standing in wait. In the second, Double Leo Sister is spiking the bouquet like a volleyball into the arms of a woman due to be married in a month.

And now, years later, I find myself gazing at the young women in their pretty summer dresses, remembering that, of the crowd, only one woman remains single. (She's school principal and a proud aunt.) Another died a dozen years ago. Of the others, about half divorced their eventual husbands; three married twice.

I look in the background, and see my aunt, and others who were middle-aged and older at the time -- all gone now; and a young man with his cup of coffee - years before losing a son to suicide.

Prescience would be such a burden, particularly at weddings.

Kindling the light

The Resident Fan Boy and I have been married for -- a while. It is our anniversary today, the day we look back to the official beginning of our marriage, picking out memories from what at the time was a blur.

Weddings are a bit like Christmas: all that preparation and it's all over in a flash. What I do remember from that time of tip-toe-ing across the emotional minefield of other people's feelings --isn't that what a family wedding is when you boil it down? -- was an overarching desire to avoid the fairy-tale aspect of the whole thing. I didn't want it to be the best day of my life because I was still very young and I really wanted to have things to look forward to. Still do, frankly.

We didn't write our own vows. The stark and rather bleak promises of the traditional wedding service are more authentic than any earnest couple can come up with; they describe marriage more accurately than anyone standing on the threshold of such a partnership is able to understand. It's only after years of struggling to live those vows that you come anywhere near to comprehending what they mean. Young as we were, we must have suspected some tiny part of that, mainly from looking at the marriages around us.

Early on in this NaBloPoMo, I went on for a bit about Phyllis McGinley. "Mid-century Love Letter" summed up our desires and terrors, although it was closer to the end of the century when it was read at our service. I'm pretty sure we appalled my very Anglican mother-in-law, but she wasn't in favour of the match to begin with:

Stay near me. Speak my name. Oh, do not wander
By a thought's span, heart's impulse, from the light
We kindle here. You are my sole defender
(As I am yours) in this precipitous night,
Which over earth, till common landmarks alter,
Is falling, without stars, and bitter cold.
We two have but our burning selves for shelter.
Huddle against me. Give me your hand to hold.
So might two climbers lost in mountain weather
On a high slope and taken by the storm,
Desperate in the darkness, cling together
Under one cloak and breathe each other warm.
Stay near me. Spirit, perishable as bone,
In no such winter can survive alone.

One little vestige of the fairy-tale did manage to creep in. My wedding bouquet. I loved it and when it was brought to me as I waited in the church basement, I really felt like a bride. It's a good thing I had to toss it; the most beautiful things have to be let go if you ever hope to keep them.

How I met my husband

How I Met My Husband is one of Alice Munro's bitter-sweet short stories (more bitter than sweet, after all, it is Alice Munro...) When I was 10, Alice Munro taught us creative writing in Sunday School. This was just before she became famous (if you're not Canadian, let me assure you, she's one of our best-known Canadian writers), and it was heavenly.

But I digress. I've just checked my perpetual calendar which isn't so perpetual because it only goes up to the year 2000, and January 24th was a Tuesday the year I met my husband. It was a rainy afternoon, and I was doing what I habitually did when I had tons of assignments to complete. I was roaming the four floors of the library at the University of Victoria, looking for someone to talk to. My friend Guinevere was in her usual spot, one of the huge leathery couches set up like booths in the basement, the only place where smoking was allowed. Guinevere didn't smoke, so I guess the leather was the attraction. That, and being able to put her feet up. Sitting with her this day was a bespectacled young man with a nervous manner, a classmate from one of Guinevere's history classes.

Years later, we had an anniversary cake inscribed with "Indifference at First Sight". I thought he was neurotic; he thought I was "a typical English student". (I was in Education at the time, but switched to an English major the following year when I discovered I despised most of my fellow Secondary Education majors.) Things weren't helped the next day when, so he claims, he greeted me and I sailed past without responding. (See prosopagnosia, three posts back --- but we only have his word to go on that this actually happened.)

Today is the anniversary of that rainy January afternoon, one of those big round ones with an 0 at the end. Bitter? Some. Sweet? Some. You don't live with one person for so many years without wanting to belt them at least once. But we don't. Not yet, anyway. We may not know everything about each other, but we know the worst, and that, I think, is what keeps either of us from bailing out. There was an air of inevitability (a word I couldn't pronounce then) throughout the weeks of our courtship, and years on, we still can't avoid each other. And that, my friends, is bitter-sweet.