swearing to it

There hasn’t been much making here at 550. A move to a different apartment—still 550 sq. ft. and thus not a name wrecker—didn’t even garner a post. J cooks me delicious dinners each night that go unrecorded. Which reminds me, right now we’re on a Mario Batali kick after we received this cookbook for our wedding. An old friend of my mom’s—who is circuitously connected to Mario—had the Italian culinary wiz write the last stanza of the Larkin poem (below) in Molto Gusto and then he (the friend) gifted it to us for the wedding. It’s been terrifically fun to eat new food—lots of vegetables and even a few extra-special pizzas. So long wedding diets. Hello pepperoni. But all this, even this, has gone unrecorded.

But there’s one thing that I want to be sure to record. I want to remember it. It’s the moment when J and I exchanged vows at our recent wedding. I had to do a lot of sweet coaxing to get J to let me post these vows here. Frankly, it was so difficult to find any models of homemade vows that were worth emulating that I don’t mind adding a couple of our own to the dearth of samples out there. After the ceremony, a friend suggested we start a side business of personalized vow writing. I’m totally game. I think it would be loads of fun to get to know a couple and then craft vows for them. If you know anyone who’s looking, point her my way. I’ll give you a little kickback. Really, I will.

Without further ado (except to say that J’s are way better than mine and it was a real drag to have to follow his performance. oh and we also both ended with a stanza of good old Walt Whitman, from Song of the Open Road):


A___, my dearest friend.

When I first met you it was sunny and we got coffee and tea off of Franklin Street and you were wearing turquoise and I was maybe a little bit shorter than I had said I was and then we talked, we just talked, we talked for hours, it was so easy, and then we said goodbye and I went home and I couldn’t sleep.

You were so exciting. You fascinated me. You still do.

In those first months after we met when I didn’t get much sleep but it didn’t matter because I was with you, a lot of things that had commanded me or a lot of things that I had let command me -- certain fears, a stubborn solitude -- they retreated into the niches and corners of my life.

And you -- who made me laugh, who took me for hikes with Arlo, who read with me and to me, who wrote me notes that you hid in the books I was reading, who even wrote me postcards sent all the way from your house in Carrboro to my home nine miles away in Durham -- you commanded my attention in all good ways. You helped wake me up, A__.

It took a few months before the pace of everything slowed, before our lives settled into a routine of sorts. And several years later, we live with routine only part of the time, in great bursts of time, like the summers when we’re together in Philadelphia instead of separated by the Appalachian Mountains outside my back door. I love when we fall into routine, and I don’t mean that life becomes mundane (I don’t know how anything with you could be mundane.), but only that we are together, day folding into day, the two of us side by side.

And so yes to “to have and to hold,” yes to “in sickness and in health,” yes to “for richer or poorer” -- yes to all that. But yes, too, to our ordinary days together, to morning coffee, to fireworks over the Schuylkill and lazy afternoons in Filter Square, yes to rambling along Brushy Fork and standing knee-deep in Superior beneath those red rock cliffs, yes to me cooking dinners for you and you editing me, yes to the day-to-day, to our happy routine -- and yes -- yes with all my heart, all my devotion -- to you, to us, to our lives twined together.

Camerado, I give you my hand!
I give you my love more precious than money,
I give you myself before preaching or law;
Will you give me yourself? Will you come travel with me?
Shall we stick by each other as long as we live?




My vows to J:

I see you. I see you.

On our third date nearly three years ago, we sat in your little apartment’s one chair. That was the year you lived in Durham and had a single chair in a tiny duplex that I told you was aggressively made for one. One chair, one towel, one bedside table. I remember looking at that one chair and wondering how I was going to fit--quite literally--into your life.

It seemed so unlikely--you with one chair--and me with six chairs, two couches, a roommate and a hundred pound hound. But that one night on our third or maybe fourth date, I came over to your apartment and you offered me your chair, your beloved and terribly unattractive lazy-z-boy reclining chair. Though I never admitted it to you, I marveled at its comfort and then we made short work of our dilemma of one chair and two bodies. We squeezed in. And we sat like that--my hip pressed against your own, our arms forced into recliner-coordination--for the better part of a year. That year we figured out how to move through tight spaces and hurried time together.

Anyway, on that date three years ago, I sat in your chair and you told me to close my eyes. I sensed that you held something close to my ear. It was tingsha, those tiny brass cymbals that send vibrations through your whole body. I—someone whose ears had been less than refined and always out of tune—felt, finally felt, in that moment what it meant to listen. It meant slowing down and giving over my body to the experience of sound. It meant patiently lingering over the last quivering reverberations.

In that moment, when you held cymbals to my ears, I knew that it was you, that you were the one that made me want to recalibrate my senses. You showed me what it meant to listen and, maybe more importantly, what it meant to hear. But it wasn’t just sound or in that moment that I learned anew. With you I see differently. I certainly taste and smell flavors that before you I didn’t know exist. Even my touch—still a bit bullish—has softened ever so slightly. And so this is what I promise you: that I’ll remain open to the new. To new sounds, to new sights, to new feelings in my body and in my brain. I promise to always listen to you, to keep hearing you as long as we shall live.

Camerado, I give you my hand!
I give you my love more precious than money,
I give you myself before preaching or law;
Will you give me yourself? Will you come travel with me?
Shall we stick by each other as long as we live?