Three of three, one of many.
This past weekend, on August 12, Dana and I celebrated the anniversary of our third wedding ceremony, which will likely be the date we mark most prominently…since at that point, we had decided we were “done” getting married and ready to start being married.
I never managed to post a detailed description of our third ceremony here in this journal, and I don’t think I ever really will…not because I’ve forgotten details, but because with so much time gone by and so much of our life already experienced, writing in depth about the ceremony seems trite, like dwelling on past glories as if to say that the past year hasn’t itself been glorious.
Last Friday we drove up to Michigan and spent a day at a lake house owned by Jen’s family, along with a number of our friends. On Saturday we drove to Muskegon to catch an 11 pm ferry across Lake Michigan to Milwaukee, at which point we would drive to House on the Rock, Wisconsin, and spend a few days there.
I say “would,” because we didn’t get to do that. After waiting for an hour at the ferry dock we were informed that the ferry had been canceled due to a broken generator. Rather than drive the six hours around the lake that night (or stay at the ferry depot and, as many others did, scream at the beleaguered dock employees who can’t possibly be paid enough to be the face of poor company restitution policies), we went back to the lake house and stayed one more night.
We elected to postpone our trip to House on the Rock until September, and instead spent our vacation in downtown Chicago in a swanky hotel. It was wonderful. We ate perhaps a quarter of our frozen wedding cake and then decided we’d had way too much of the cavity-inducing goodness. We had an incredible dinner on the side of the Chicago River just a few yards from where a film crew was wrapping up the day’s work on The Dark Knight, the sequel to Batman Begins (we saw no actors, only several police vehicles made up to look like Gotham City property). I gave her two collections of the Dan Slott-penned She-Hulk, a DVD presentation of Carmen, her favorite opera, and a sonnet I’d composed for her. She gave me a copy of the book The Princess Bride 25th Anniversary Edition, as well as a new DVD copy of the film, and a T-shirt I’ve coveted for a few years now. We fell asleep early and woke up late. We enjoyed that we had been married for a year.
There are words for my love that have not been invented yet. There are words for my love that died long ago and sit under the crust of the earth, waiting to be excavated by linguistic paleontologists. There are words for my love, alive today, that were all hired out for an exclusive party, and I apologize if you needed them, but they received an offer they would have been heartless to refuse.
Creative Control 