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?

readings

(warning: photo bears no relation to post, but I'm still thinking about the U.P. and can't help but sharing a bit more of it)

J and I felt pretty strongly that our ceremony should be a reflection of us. I’m sure that most couples start out with this desire, but it’s easy to see why, in practice, the ceremony often becomes something else entirely. There are always competing interests to please—or at least satisfy—and personal desire can begin to seem, at least relatively, almost selfish. J and I faced interreligious challenges and opportunities, but as neither of us has what I might call an active religious life, we hoped to created a secular ceremony that conveyed some gravitas. We wanted a bit of heft without religious signifiers, and as it turns out, it’s not so easy to do. I should say that I also have a knee-jerk aversion to sappy or saccharine exclamations of love and its saving power. I also didn’t want anything in the ceremony that suggested merging or becoming one in some transcendental love sphere.

The readings, then, were an important part of our ceremony. We’re blessed to have friends that are writers and poets, discerning and particular in their tastes. They’re gifted readers and managed to make their readings electric in the mid-summer air. I imagine that I'll remember J's friend Eric's perfectly dry--and also stunningly engaged--reading of the Frank O'Hara's poem long after I forget everything else. I include them here because I loved them so much and because they seemed like blessed—though secular—gifts from people who have shaped our individual lives and who helped us make our way to the point of marriage.

#1
It is clear that we must hold to what is difficult; everything alive
holds to it, everything in Nature grows and defends itself in its own
way and is characteristically and spontaneously itself, seeks at all
costs to be so and against all opposition.

To love is good, too: love being difficult. For one human being to
love another: that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the
ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work
is but preparation.

Love is at first not anything that means merging, giving over and
uniting with another (for what would a union be of something
unclarified and unfinished, still subordinate?), it is a high
inducement to the individual to ripen, to become world, to become
world for himself for another’s sake. It is a great exacting claim
upon him, something that chooses him out and calls him to vast
distances.

– Rainer Maria Rilke

#2
Having a Coke with You
is even more fun than going to San Sebastian, Irún, Hendaye, Biarritz, Bayonne
or being sick to my stomach on the Travesera de Gracia in Barcelona
partly because in your orange shirt you look like a better happier St. Sebastian
partly because of my love for you, partly because of your love for yoghurt
partly because of the fluorescent orange tulips around the birches
partly because of the secrecy our smiles take on before people and statuary
it is hard to believe when I’m with you that there can be anything as still
as solemn as unpleasantly definitive as statuary when right in front of it
in the warm New York 4 o’clock light we are drifting back and forth
between each other like a tree breathing through its spectacles

and the portrait show seems to have no faces in it at all, just paint
you suddenly wonder why in the world anyone ever did them
I look
at you and I would rather look at you than all the portraits in the world
except possibly for the Polish Rider occasionally and anyway it’s in the Frick
which thank heavens you haven’t gone to yet so we can go together the first time
and the fact that you move so beautifully more or less takes care of Futurism
just as at home I never think of the Nude Descending a Staircase or
at a rehearsal a single drawing of Leonardo or Michelangelo that used to wow me
and what good does all the research of the Impressionists do them
when they never got the right person to stand near the tree when the sun sank
or for that matter Marino Marini when he didn’t pick the rider as carefully
as the horse

it seems they were all cheated of some marvelous experience
which is not going to go wasted on me which is why I’m telling you about it

– Frank O’Hara


#3
Is it for now or for always,
The world hangs on a stalk?
Is it a trick or a trysting-place,
The woods we have found to walk?

Is it a mirage or miracle,
Your lips that lift at mine:
And the suns like a juggler’s juggling-balls,
Are they a sham or a sign?

Shine out, my sudden angel,
Break fear with breast and brow,
I take you now and for always,
For always is always now.

– Philip Larkin

along the road

I know that my chronology is all shot to hell her at 550. Apparently I’m not abiding calendrical time very well. But you’ll just have to take what I can offer in fits and starts. The start tonight is getting my “honeymoon” pictures a bit organized. And those aren’t errant quotation marks, either. Our post-wedding get-a-way wasn’t your typical drinking-sweet-cocktails-with little-umbrellas-in-the-Caribbean kind of trip. Instead we drove 420 miles north of the wedding to Jacobsville, Michigan, a nearly uninhabited hamlet on the Keweenaw Peninsula. My mom and her husband own an old strawberry farm—or at least the farmhouse—on the top of some pretty majestic red rock cliffs.

I’ve been there before, and in the past, I’ve found something to renew myself along the slow dirt roads and in Superior’s icy waves. This time, though, was different. I was different. I was so—so, so, so, so—anxious about the wedding that I had imagined once it was over, I would be able to blissfully relax, to let it all go. This is what J did and boy did it look nice.

I should have known, knowing me, that it wouldn’t really feel like that in my head. Instead, my wedding anxiety followed us, transformed now into a feelings of terror and guilt that I hadn’t thanked all the people who had helped us have such a lovely day. I just couldn’t let it go. All of these people, people I love, had given so much and I worried that they were seething with rage because I hadn’t thanked them enough or in the right way. And so here we were in the middle of summer’s awesome beauty and all I could do was draft appropriately conciliatory thank you notes in my head. Even recounting it now makes me worry about my sanity.

As J read on the hammock, alternating mysteries with “real” novels and catnaps, I had to find a way to redirect my anxiety (how else can I account for thirty years of handwork?). So I started looking, really looking at our place on Red Rock Road. In looking through the viewfinder of my camera, in finding parallel lines and brocaded landscapes, aging fonts and glistening steel, I started to unwind. I wandered through the little sleeping cabins and newly-painted sauna looking for vestiges of former visitors. I found yellowing Life magazines from the ‘50s and an alabaster Buddha perched cliffside. Mostly I found colors and patterns, traces of light and shadow. Looking closely around me, I started to feel the energy, the anxiety petering out. I just need about a month instead of a week. Next time.

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.

welcomings

Last night my dear friend Tasha--and her husband Geoff--had their first baby. A girl. Her name is Haviland, which seems just about perfect. I can finally reveal the decidedly unfeminine--and unsummery--sweater that I'm hoping will fit during the coldest days of February in Massachusetts. I once again followed Elizabeth Zimmerman's belief in gray as the best color for babies...



Congratulations Tash. I hope you and Haviland find a beautiful rhythm in the days ahead.

bridezilla

When J and I got engaged last fall he told me that he expected—and would tolerate—a couple infamous anne freak-outs. He was clear about this: I was allowed a total of two meltdowns. Meltdowns could entail my telling him that I didn’t want to get married, swearing that I was perfectly sure that I didn’t want to get married. They could—though probably shouldn’t—include my sending back my engagement ring and refusing to discuss it. J, who is patient beyond all measure with me, knew that I needed a very wide berth if I was going to get through the whole process of coming to this major commitment.

But a funny thing happened when he gave me all this latitude. I didn’t seem to need it at all. In fact, save for a very brief inability to talk about the engagement, I did just fine for months and months and months. I was doing so well with it all, in fact, that I kept saying to him, “I mean can you believe I’m this calm?” He’d smile and we’d go on our way to get shrimp tacos.

That was before.

In the last few days, my cool, my calm has broken. I had epic, loud, and writhing meltdowns each of the last two nights. The first was about my desire for a communal song during the ceremony—a kind of kumbaya moment of collective vocal embrace—which J thinks is a lousy idea. He’s probably right. The second was about my desire for a second white wine, an alternative to the cases of chardonnay that my father bought and that anyone under 60 will likely scoff at. Neither of these things is essential. Neither of them is even that important. Both of them are mostly ridiculous. And here’s the thing: I knew this as I screamed—really actually screamed—at J. But my whole body felt totally furious. At one second I wanted to belt him and at the next I never wanted to see him again. And this went on and on and on.

As I marched out of the apartment, I struggled to make sense of it all.

A conversation with a friend helped me articulate what’s been happening in the last couple days. The way I described it to her was as the feeling of being consumed bodily with tremendous emotion. Sometimes I could point intellectually to the feeling as that of fear or anger, but mostly it just felt like too much feeling in every cell of my body.

It’s ugly and people don’t really want to hear about it.

After all, so much of getting married is about matching and comparing—contrasting and resisting—your felt experience to all the models of blissful nuptials that come into your field of vision everyday. All the planning is about reconciling desire with reality, and now I have to fight to stay grounded. I have to struggle not to wallop the sewing machine repair man or J or my mother, all of whom are trying to help and all of whom hardly recognize me.

And mostly I have to make room to feel, whatever feelings they may be and try not to destroy J in the process. Getting married is a big step for me, a really big step. For the last decade or so I’ve lived with the belief that the next best thing is right around the corner and I’d better run as fast as I can away from the now to get to it. That desire has mostly subsided over the last few years, but letting go of it completely feels pretty scary but also like the best thing I’ve ever done for myself.

I just need to remind myself of that.

sunny with a chance of a late-day shower

We mark our age in so many ways. Our skirts get a touch longer. We drive a little slower. Maybe we swear a little less than we used to. And our age marks us in so many other ways. Our crow’s feet get a little deeper. Our glasses become a hair thicker. And in my case, well, I start checking the weather.

I used to shamelessly mock my grandfather for asking about the weather every time we spoke. I used to laugh with my friend Damon about his father’s slightly unhealthy obsession with the forecast in places where he wasn’t. All this asking after the clouds seemed hopeless—painfully—old.

But that was before. Now you might say that I’m a weather fanatic. I turn on the radio right when I wake up so that I can catch the 6:40 weather report. I sign on to weather.com when I get to the office. I’m especially partial to long-range forecasts. I like thinking 10 days out, and I like knowing that it might just rain a week from Wednesday. I might as well have a HAM radio and a doppler feed at my bedside.

I can’t say that I get it. I don’t know where it’s come from, but I find myself asking after the weather when I get an old pal on the phone: “so how’s it lookin’ in Omaha?” I might ask. As the words tumble out, I kinda giggle at myself and I kinda just want to know about the weather.

I don’t know if I’m becoming a simpleton or what. Without a “rain plan” for the wedding, I do know that I’m a bit obsessed with the chance for rain in 49686 in 22 days. I’ll be keeping an eye on my storm tracker. You should keep your fingers crossed.

vicariously

We’ve had a lot to celebrate of late. I use that pronoun very intentionally. I mean I haven’t been celebrating. I’ve been scrambling. Scrambling to move from 550 feet in apartment 2C to 550 feet in apartment 2D. Scrambling to finish my history of bryn mawr (300 pages done and another 70 to go). Scrambling to find time to sew and to read and to exercise. Scrambling to figure out what I’m going to say in one month when I stand up in front of my friends and family and tell J why I’ve chosen him. So I’ve just been hurrying.

But we, well, we have a lot to celebrate.

Like the Lakers winning it all.
Like the end of J’s semester and his summer stay in Philly.
Like the fact that J got a book contract from UNC press.
Like the fact that J got a surprise “bonus” from his college.

So you see, J has a lot to celebrate.

I couldn’t care less about the Lakers.
I didn’t have an end to the semester because I have to finish this book.
I don’t have a hope in hell of UNC ever publishing my book because they published its doppelganger in April.
My promised cost of living increase turns out to be an extra $12.32 a month.

But wait, this isn’t self-pity, though it may look a lot like it. No, this is about feeling—I mean really actually feeling—what it means to be a “we.”

I sat at the bar last night until the wee hours with my fists clenched actually cheering for Kobe.
I made room in my 550 square feet—clearing drawers and closets—for the arrival of J and I greeted him with tremendous good cheer.
I imagine his book with its sexy new title and I think, yeah, I sorta kinda helped make it happen.
That bonus of his and those $12.32 will make plane tickets next year a teeny-tiny bit better.

I think probably the best part of choosing this “we-ness” is about allowing his good fortunes to feel like my own. I feel fortunate that he’s willing to share.

much too much

When things get busy, I get forgetful. Really forgetful. Stupidly forgetful. When I was studying for my Ph.D. exams—the lowest point of my existence—I let the exams dominate my consciousness to the point at which I couldn’t keep anything else straight. I’d show up to teach the class I’d been teaching all semester an hour late.
I’d forget dentist appointments and I’d forget to return calls, for months on end. It
was ugly.

So as I walked home from the gym yesterday—all sweaty and gross because for some reason I decided it would be faster to shower at home—I fished around in my backpack for my keys. I checked every pocket. Scrounged around in bowels of the bag (where I did manage to turn up the watch I’ve been looking for since February). They weren’t there. I knew they weren’t there. I knew I’d forgotten them. The tears started welling up as I walked a little faster home. By the time I got to door, I was inconsolable and irate. Where were my damn keys? Or what about the spares? The building manager was gone and the ever-inebriated maintenance guy said it would take him an hour to come back to town and he’d charge me $50. My doorman—who in a year has never uttered more than four words to me—kept saying “oh baby, don’t worry. Don’t you worry a thing.” I probably should have been indignant that he was calling me “baby,” but really, I just sort of liked the way it sounded. J would tell you that the only reason I was upset was because I was going to have to shell out fifty bucks for being an idiot. But really I was upset about what this little episode suggested: that’s it’s all gotten to be just way too much.

There’s the wedding, sure, but the real stress right now is getting through this enormous book project for the college. It’s big, like 350 pages big. And there are a thousand things left to be done, not to mention 30 more years of content to uncover, transcribe, edit, arrange. And here’s the rub: I was supposed to be done before I left for the wedding. But as each day passes and more work rather than less appears, I have a feeling it’s not going to be done on time. The schedule was too ambitious from the start, especially as I was expected to teach a new class--and teach it well--this semester. I was also formulating an enormous conference for September and trying in the early hours to actually get out my own work. It’s just been too much, way too much.

When Stephen, the surprisingly sober maintenance guy, showed up to let me last night, I told him that in writing that check for $50, I was handing over a little piece of my soul. He wasn’t amused. After I shut the door and forced myself to breathe, I remembered in a flash: my damned spare keys are with the damned doorman. I left them there on Friday when I thought a friend was coming to town. So I just paid fifty bucks not because I locked myself out, but because I forgot to mention to the “baby”-calling doorman that my keys were in his little drawer, 3 feet away from me as I cried on the bench.

I sprinted downstairs and nearly out of breath, bellowed to the doorman, “you have my keys. My keys are in your drawer.” At that moment he looked upon me with a mixture of pity and amusement, “oh baby, you workin' too hard.”

This baby is certainly working too hard.