Anniversary

Each morning this week, my husband and I have woken early and walked together.  With our two sons back in school, the daily rhythm of our life has shifted.   We’ve gone from twenty years of being utterly child-centered — and from a summer of family schedule-juggling, despite the fact that our children, at 17 and 20, are not actually children anymore — to the quieter intimacy of two.

We take the same route from our house, a loop through the woods and along a quiet bike path, then up the hill toward home.  By the time I put coffee on and Steve heads upstairs to shower, the sun is well up and we have said to one another all the things that are on our minds.  Already this new ritual feels special, worth protecting and continuing.  Sunday we marked our twenty-third wedding anniversary.  I say marked instead of celebrated because there were no gifts or letters exchanged, no romantic tryst in a hotel, no showy surprises.  We shared a bottle of champagne, and in the morning we put on our sneakers and began the twenty-fourth year of our life together.

A couple of days earlier, I’d had a couple of old home videos transferred to DVD, and Steve and Jack and I sat in the kitchen that night and watched the footage of our wedding, September 12, 1987.  How odd it was, to see my own parents, just about the age that I am now; to see the two of us not as parents but as young lovers; to see so many friends and dear ones who have passed away in these intervening years, but who, on that joyful day, were simply alive: dancing and making toasts and chatting under a white and yellow tent.  My dad had bought the video camera just for the occasion.  No one in the family quite knew what to do with it, and so it was casually passed around, from one willing photographer to the next.  Someone managed to film our first kiss, a blizzard of rice, my grandmother with her black purse on her arm, Steve leading me out to the dance floor.  My Uncle Chet zeroed in for quite a while on a college friend of mine, dancing barefoot in a transparent purple dress.  And then, a bit tipsy perhaps, and unaware that he had failed to press the “off” button, he simply carried the camera around as he enjoyed the party.  So this is what we have: an unwitting, ridiculously precious hour of captured feet and sky and tent-top.  Most of our wedding video could be mistaken for a bad Robert Altman spoof — random and unscripted and oddly revealing.  All those legs and pairs of shoes! All those wide, aimless swaths of grass and ground, followed by majestic arcs to cloud and awning and tent pole.  The uncensored soundtrack of laughter, clinking glasses, party talk, swing music.

We had a laugh the other day, my husband, son and I, watching what is arguably the worst wedding video ever recorded.  But at the same time, I can’t help but treasure this odd memento, this collage of accidental moments captured for all time.  What I realize is that the quality of the picture-taking doesn’t matter all that much; meaning is not to be found there anyway.  The truth of our lives is not in photographs that freeze time and memory, any more than it is to be found in gift-wrapped boxes or champagne bottles. And yet each glimpse of that long-ago day, each unplanned kiss and silly dance move, each overheard scrap of conversation and each tapping foot does remind me to wake up and pay attention right now.  Twenty-three years of marriage is a multitude of moments lived, of gestures made, words spoken.  We have not always been kind.  Mistakes have been made. Regret, perhaps, is inevitable.  And yet what I glimpse in that video–love, optimism, anticipation–endures.  How grateful I am for all that we’ve shared, for the two sons who are now nearly men themselves, for the quiet early mornings of this bright autumn.

My heart is full today. A beloved friend is nearing the end of a long, exceedingly courageous journey with cancer.  Moment by moment, she is being called upon to let go of this physical world and to open to mysteries beyond our human understanding.  Watching the sunrise at 6:30 this morning, walking in the woods, touching my husband’s arm, I tried to live and love and pay attention enough for both of us, for a friend who is not ready to leave this earth and for myself, so fully occupied upon it.  I wondered whether — if I could only be grateful enough, notice enough, feel deeply enough — I might somehow occupy both realms at once, material and spiritual.  “Write me the mundane details of your life,” she e-mailed the other night, from her hospital bed.  I try to do that.  And each time I pause, and look, and gather up some small bouquet of mundane details, what I see is not ordinariness but evidence:  this world in which we are blessed to live is full of meaning, beauty, and holiness.