Rabbit, rabbit. The first of the month was Sunday, but my time has been doing its best to disappear since then.
This is the week by whose end I will be married. Will have been married for a day, even, counting from the afternoon on Thursday. I do not know if that should be a strange sentence to write; it isn't one I spent most of my life expecting. From the point last September when Rob looked up at me in the light from the lamp on the computer case that doubled as his side table and said, "You realize we're probably going to get married," however, it has felt in some ways like an ordinary thing. (It wasn't a proposal. We proposed to one another in March, with books and the cat-emblem rings we have been wearing on our right hands ever since. It was the recognition that we weren't talking about vows and rituals and children's names just for the pipe-dream fun of it; it was the thing I knew he was going to say as soon as he went silent in a particular way, around two in the morning. We joke that the telepathy only works when it's funny, but it's proven to have a few other applications as well. I said I'd thought of it. We decided to winter out first. We made it through the winter.) I am surprised only insofar as I am marrying anyone, because it was not a goal of my childhood or a settled fact of my adult life; I considered it much more likely that I would never find anyone whose habits of life and mind interlocked permanently with mine, or if I did, it might not be a marriage. Past that particular act of acceptance, I am not at all surprised that it's Rob.
I haven't been writing about the wedding much, partly because I haven't wanted to make this journal a catalogue of logistics. There has been a great deal more last-minute than we hoped or planned for, matching the things that have been no trouble at all. The poles for the chuppah are borrowed, beautifully turned, and lead-weight; I wrenched my back badly tonight fetching them out of the storeroom of their current owner, who carved them decades ago as a wedding present for another couple. The cloth was embroidered by my namesake great-grandmother over ninety years ago and rested quietly in the cedar chest from which my mother unpacked and offered it weeks ago; the design is of poppies and my father is fashioning small soft clamps that will hold it to the poles without strain on the threads. The kiddush cup is old silver and belonged to my grandfather, but we need to purchase wine tomorrow. Our wedding clothes are the green velvet dress and the black velvet jacket we've owned for years, supplemented with a pair of new pants on Rob's side and a pair of new boots on mine; the ketubah arrived this morning and was discovered to be the victim of an inexplicable snafu on the artist's end which we are hoping our calligrapher can amend or at least cope with. We are picking up the marriage license before we meet Rob's mother at the airport. We are waiting on the rings. What really matters is that everyone we asked to the wedding will be there, and that we are saying to one another what it matters most to us to say. Rob's father is officiating for his side, the rabbi whom we found through my singing teacher for mine. It's the last hour of Hanukkah, although we aren't putting that in the ketubah. Lights against the dark.
He had a haircut from the Mercury Theatre the first time I saw him; he was onstage in 1938 with a script in one hand and a bunch of flummoxed gestures in the other, Frank Cyrano in a sand-colored sweater vest racking his brain to determine whether the pizza some joker from Emperor Norton's had just ordered in was an anachronism or a swing-band-plausible prank. I looked like some LJ-icons of indeterminate gender who said positive things about the show later that night. We met in person in the green room of Arisia in 2010, when it was still being held in the hell-ziggurat on the Charles that dispensed free claustrophobia and social anxiety along with inconvenient scheduling; he had just come from being Dr. Alberts in a lab coat and appalling tie and I was trying to grab some snacking and breathing space in my one free hour between panels all day. We talked over LJ, intermittently and with appreciation of intelligence and art; I saw him in four more shows before we met in a context that wasn't after one of them. That was last January. The story since then is, in retrospect, a shockingly direct progression. I don't expect it to stop on Thursday.
Being married isn't an endpoint. It's a beginning, but it isn't a cold start: I don't know when we began our lives together, because an afternoon of conversation at a bookstore is the kind of glancing thing that might happen with anyone of sufficient interest and eighteen hours of sci-fi film is the kind of venturing thing that can happen with someone who really likes movies and forty-five days from hanging out to kissing is not the kind of thing that happened to me with anyone else in my life; we moved not effortlessly, but so naturally into one another's orbits that for months I kept expecting it to break, like a spell. Our first night together, we told the stories of how we had met in 1943: the flat with rain-cracked ceilings and the little wrought-iron balcony, the typewriter we shared, the Atlantic crossings; he heard me singing for the USO, the shy stranger with the sounding-blue eyes I saw splicing and editing the broadcasts. Both of us Odysseus and Penelope, meeting at the story of the bed we lay in. We fought and it didn't break; we were happy and it didn't, either. And it is not nothing that we are marrying—I wouldn't spend so much time organizing for nothing—but one of the reasons I think our wedding is not more of an event in the conventional sense is that it's confirming, affirming what we know about ourselves already: we matter to each other. We are choosing to recognize it with a ceremony we have built ourselves out of the traditions that speak to us, leaving all the rest aside (besides, if strippers really are a prerequisite for bachelor parties, we'd have both ended up at The Slutcracker and that would just have been an evening out), but it is not out of obligation: now this comes next. None of this last year and eleven months is what I thought would come next, except that it delighted me so that it did.
It has not been without pain; it has never been not worth it. If that's how a marriage works, I am all for it.
This is the week by whose end I will be married. Will have been married for a day, even, counting from the afternoon on Thursday. I do not know if that should be a strange sentence to write; it isn't one I spent most of my life expecting. From the point last September when Rob looked up at me in the light from the lamp on the computer case that doubled as his side table and said, "You realize we're probably going to get married," however, it has felt in some ways like an ordinary thing. (It wasn't a proposal. We proposed to one another in March, with books and the cat-emblem rings we have been wearing on our right hands ever since. It was the recognition that we weren't talking about vows and rituals and children's names just for the pipe-dream fun of it; it was the thing I knew he was going to say as soon as he went silent in a particular way, around two in the morning. We joke that the telepathy only works when it's funny, but it's proven to have a few other applications as well. I said I'd thought of it. We decided to winter out first. We made it through the winter.) I am surprised only insofar as I am marrying anyone, because it was not a goal of my childhood or a settled fact of my adult life; I considered it much more likely that I would never find anyone whose habits of life and mind interlocked permanently with mine, or if I did, it might not be a marriage. Past that particular act of acceptance, I am not at all surprised that it's Rob.
I haven't been writing about the wedding much, partly because I haven't wanted to make this journal a catalogue of logistics. There has been a great deal more last-minute than we hoped or planned for, matching the things that have been no trouble at all. The poles for the chuppah are borrowed, beautifully turned, and lead-weight; I wrenched my back badly tonight fetching them out of the storeroom of their current owner, who carved them decades ago as a wedding present for another couple. The cloth was embroidered by my namesake great-grandmother over ninety years ago and rested quietly in the cedar chest from which my mother unpacked and offered it weeks ago; the design is of poppies and my father is fashioning small soft clamps that will hold it to the poles without strain on the threads. The kiddush cup is old silver and belonged to my grandfather, but we need to purchase wine tomorrow. Our wedding clothes are the green velvet dress and the black velvet jacket we've owned for years, supplemented with a pair of new pants on Rob's side and a pair of new boots on mine; the ketubah arrived this morning and was discovered to be the victim of an inexplicable snafu on the artist's end which we are hoping our calligrapher can amend or at least cope with. We are picking up the marriage license before we meet Rob's mother at the airport. We are waiting on the rings. What really matters is that everyone we asked to the wedding will be there, and that we are saying to one another what it matters most to us to say. Rob's father is officiating for his side, the rabbi whom we found through my singing teacher for mine. It's the last hour of Hanukkah, although we aren't putting that in the ketubah. Lights against the dark.
He had a haircut from the Mercury Theatre the first time I saw him; he was onstage in 1938 with a script in one hand and a bunch of flummoxed gestures in the other, Frank Cyrano in a sand-colored sweater vest racking his brain to determine whether the pizza some joker from Emperor Norton's had just ordered in was an anachronism or a swing-band-plausible prank. I looked like some LJ-icons of indeterminate gender who said positive things about the show later that night. We met in person in the green room of Arisia in 2010, when it was still being held in the hell-ziggurat on the Charles that dispensed free claustrophobia and social anxiety along with inconvenient scheduling; he had just come from being Dr. Alberts in a lab coat and appalling tie and I was trying to grab some snacking and breathing space in my one free hour between panels all day. We talked over LJ, intermittently and with appreciation of intelligence and art; I saw him in four more shows before we met in a context that wasn't after one of them. That was last January. The story since then is, in retrospect, a shockingly direct progression. I don't expect it to stop on Thursday.
Being married isn't an endpoint. It's a beginning, but it isn't a cold start: I don't know when we began our lives together, because an afternoon of conversation at a bookstore is the kind of glancing thing that might happen with anyone of sufficient interest and eighteen hours of sci-fi film is the kind of venturing thing that can happen with someone who really likes movies and forty-five days from hanging out to kissing is not the kind of thing that happened to me with anyone else in my life; we moved not effortlessly, but so naturally into one another's orbits that for months I kept expecting it to break, like a spell. Our first night together, we told the stories of how we had met in 1943: the flat with rain-cracked ceilings and the little wrought-iron balcony, the typewriter we shared, the Atlantic crossings; he heard me singing for the USO, the shy stranger with the sounding-blue eyes I saw splicing and editing the broadcasts. Both of us Odysseus and Penelope, meeting at the story of the bed we lay in. We fought and it didn't break; we were happy and it didn't, either. And it is not nothing that we are marrying—I wouldn't spend so much time organizing for nothing—but one of the reasons I think our wedding is not more of an event in the conventional sense is that it's confirming, affirming what we know about ourselves already: we matter to each other. We are choosing to recognize it with a ceremony we have built ourselves out of the traditions that speak to us, leaving all the rest aside (besides, if strippers really are a prerequisite for bachelor parties, we'd have both ended up at The Slutcracker and that would just have been an evening out), but it is not out of obligation: now this comes next. None of this last year and eleven months is what I thought would come next, except that it delighted me so that it did.
It has not been without pain; it has never been not worth it. If that's how a marriage works, I am all for it.
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