A woefully inadequate start

The last few weeks have felt like much of the last few years: quick, really, really quick. When I first met J—he was 33 at the time—he waxed on about wanting to press pause, to slow down. At 30—or was I 31?—I expressed complete bafflement about this notion. Why ever would you want to press pause when the next greatest thing might be just around the bend?

Over the last few weeks, though, all I’ve wanted is a pause button. Everything has happened so quickly, with such a force of energy and emotion that I hardly know what’s happened. J and I decided that it must be a mid-30s kind of thing, that once you reach the middle of that decade everything speeds up to the point of indecipherability.

This space, this modest little space, helps slow things down. Even now, as I sit on the morning train thinking about the 46 things on my To-Do List, I find myself slowing down just enough to reflect and remember, to stretch out all that’s happened into sentences and paragraphs. As my deadlines loom large at the moment, I’m hoping that my commute might be a kind of pause button, an iron horse trotting only so fast that I might have time to reflect inside its belly.

In any case, I have a lot to say and show from the wedding. The images are starting to trickle in and I’m hoping to post the readings and perhaps even our vows here over the next couple weeks. For now, though, I thought I’d begin with a more mundane kind of celebration.

On Sunday we celebrated my mom’s birthday (which is, coincidentally, the birthday of my ex-boyfriend turned close friend, his father, his friend Karen, and the mother of my high school boyfriend) with a perfect mid-summer dinner on the porch in Michigan. J and I made grilled salmon with lime butter sauce. We served iceberg wedges with homemade bleu cheese dressing and we drank mojitos with limes left over from the wedding. The fish was cooked just right, but the real cause for celebration—at least for me—was that wedge of lettuce.

Oh how I missed the humble lettuces of old! The perfectly watery crunch of iceberg lettuce, with its nearly flavorless modesty, reminds me that for all the nutritional bravado of baby spinach or spring greens or bibb lettuce or even romaine, they just can’t compete with that crunch. We chilled the iceberg in a bath of ice water and then let it drip dry in the fridge for two hours so that the crunch was a serious crunch, a loud and mandiblely satisfying crunch.

We ended the evening's celebration with a trip to Moomers, Josh's favorite ice cream spot, with my delightfully quirky aunt and cousin.