Thank You For Four Beautiful Years

Every now and then, I get to be a total mush-pot.



You don't mind, do you? See, it's my blog and I feel kind of entitled sometimes.



Mrs. Apron and I were married four years ago today, under a chuppah dappled with sunflowers, on a sun-drenched October the 22nd on a lovely little hilltop with friends and family, and Gilbert & Sullivan, and a celtic fiddle, guitar, and mandolin trio. There were personal vows, scrawled in pencil on scratch paper, written only hours before, at around one o'clock in the morning while we waited for a tow-truck that never came, to tow away an inert 1966 Volkswagen Beetle that was to be, but never was, our getaway car.



Herbie didn't ride again.



One of our vows was to wait for tow-trucks together. One was to save the last rye chip in the Chex Mix bag for the other. One was to hold hands when we're scared. Truthfully, I don't remember the rest, but I suspect we're making good on our promises to each other most of the time.



And, when we don't, we're pretty good at mending the cracks that inevitably show up in the plaster.



I remember back when Mrs. Apron and I were dating. She lives in Pittsburgh and I lived just outside of Philadelphia. I remember the 311 mile drives to and fro, all along I-76. I remember the billboards about Christ and Gettysburg. I remember splitting my urethra while urinating at the rest stop in Chambersburg, sending streams of pee straight down onto my brand-new trousers. Trousers which I promptly threw in the trash can in favor of corduroys, the only other pants that I'd packed-- oh, and it was around 88 degrees. I remember our first dates, I remember birthdays and field trips, G&S parodies and cuddling together on the couch to watch "E. R.," (an early mutual favorite that we later fell out of love with, you know, after the second helicopter crash), or "COPS" (my influence) or "Project Runway" (her influence) with hot Irish Breakfast tea and home-made lemon bread.



I also remember disagreements and challenges and fumbles and tears-- the brain surgery and the miscarriage, but those are meant to be remembered, just like the laughter and the fun. It's life-- what can you do? Life's like that when you have a partner. Well, it's like that when you don't, too, but I'm glad I've got mine. Sometimes I say, "I don't know who I was before my wife," but that's really not true. I do. It's just that sometimes I'd rather not remember that guy.



He wasn't all that.



The schedule's been a tad crowded these last few months-- with both of us leaving and starting jobs, and facing the challenges of DIY kitchen remodeling and me working swing shift every other weekend, well, life's been different around here. And, in many ways, the same. I'm still just as excited as the dogs when she comes home. And I think that's as good a sign as any. I don't make loud, inappropriate noises or pee on the rug, though. We'll save those types of shenanigans for our fortieth anniversary, I think.



Thank you for holding my hand, Bobber. I used to get scared a lot more than I do these days.

Up Go the Trolley Cars

There’s a lot of shit on the desk.

Our computer desk is a repository for the randomest junk imaginable. Most of the time, I don’t even see it anymore. My eyes just kind of glaze over it, drifting listlessly from our real estate tax bill (not due until August 31st, thank you) to the black pen to the red pen to the pen with flowers all over it to the pair of orange-handled scissors to the orange camera case to the “Peter Pan” program to the pink scrap of fabric with dress mannequins on it.

There’s one item here that really stands out. It’s a 1/24th scale silver Volkswagen Beetle with a long piece of wire sticking out from the center of its hood, right where the VW medalion would be, you know, if it were a real car, and, at the end of the piece of the wire is a curly-q and, shoved into that curly-q is a photograph.

Like, an actual, real, no-bullshit photograph that's 4x6ish. It's me & the Mrs. The Mrs. & I. The Apron-heads. In this picture, it's 2005. She's wearing the same eyeglasses she's got on today. Mine have changed approximately six times since then. Her hair is shortish, and a wisp of it is flying clear across her fair forehead. She's got on her red "Elmo" fleece. I'm wearing a red, blue, and gray bowtie she handmade for me. I've got on a parka. Do people still call them "parkas?" I am out-of-touch-- with style. Reality. A lot of things.

We're sitting on a bench, but you can't see it in the picture. All you can see is us, in front of a brick wall. Beautiful, blood-red bricks-- bolder and stronger than your average brick, because they were hand-commissioned for a man who was bolder and stronger than the average man.

"I am not an American," he said, "I am the American."

We're sitting on a bench on Mark Twain's porch. The Hartford Home. 351 Farmington Avenue. "Up go the trolley cars for Mark Twain's daughter. Down go the trolley cars for Mark Twain's daughter." That's what his daughter, Susy, said, over and over again as she watched the traffic go by from her bedroom window, in the final hours of her life, her brain ravaged by spinal meningitis-- hundreds and hundreds of miles away from the family that loved her. Susy Clemens was 24.

The picture of us was taken on October 9th, 2005-- Mrs. Apron's birthday. She had just turned 24. Moments before this picture was taken, I proposed. I was behaving like a whackjob all during the tour. I kept putting my hand inside my pocket to make sure the box with the ring was still in there. Because I would lose it. Because birds shit in my eye. Because I am incapable, incompetent, in...conclusive. But never inebriated.

Thankfully. Wouldn't help.

When my wife asked me later why I decided to propose to her at Mark Twain's house, I didn't have an immediate answer at the ready. It took me a little while to figure it all out. It was a house that had seen so much sadness-- Twain nearly drove his family to financial ruin, and to save on expenses, he was forced to shut up the Hartford Home he and his family loved so and travel like a vagabond. He lost the love of his life, little Susy, in that home, and he didn't even make it back for the funeral. But, it was a house that Twain had specially built to surround his family in peace, opulence, and love. It was a house, he said, that would "celebrate this kind of love." The love he had for his wife, Livy.

The Hartford Home is the epicenter of Victorian beauty, grace, delicacy, extravagence, and refinement. Being in it, for me, is like being hugged by the past-- and I like that. More than that, I suppose, and I was finally able to articulate this to my wife after some inevitable Apron-style fumbling-- I wanted to propose to her in a spot that I was sure would always, always be. Yes, there was a time in the past where the future of the Hartford Home was uncertain-- it was unceremoniously chopped up into apartments in the 1940s, I believe, before it was rescued and rehabbed. But, it was Mark Twain's home, and, therefore, it will survive. It will endure. There will be literati and philanthropists who will swoop in and save it from ruin. They will hug it back. I was worried that, if I proposed to her in some place of perhaps lesser significance that, some day, that place will not be there anymore.

And, if our love is to go on forever, well, I'd kind of like the locale of the proposal to go on forever, too. Or as close to forever as we can reasonably expect.

This past weekend, when we were playing in the ocean together in Brigantine, the waves were breaking over our backs and, sometimes, our heads, and as my wife squealed (totes) with delight, and as I held her around her waist, I felt the euphoria and exhilaration I felt in June or July of 2005 when we did the same in Ventnor in the ocean, laughing and loving atop the shell-coated sea-floor together, the waves crashing all around us-- us jumping around like children.

"I almost proposed to you there, in the ocean, that day," I told her later, "and I know that the Atlantic Ocean will always be there, but how could we be sure that it was that exact spot-- by that rock jetty, or was it that one half-a-mile down? How would we know for sure?"

Besides: people pee in there, you know.

A Naked Marriage

My sister got married today.

She got married in judge's chambers, at approximately 4:00pm this afternoon. I was at home, having just walked the dog, and was in the process of trying to decide whether to take an online quiz about Poe, Melville and Dickinson, or masturbate. Today, the scholar in me won out. And I suppose it's better that I was engaged in an innocuous, studious act at the moment my sister was getting married-- better ju-ju and all that.

I never imagined that my sister would get married and I wouldn't be there. Then again, I never thought my sister would ever get married, and I certainly never thought that my sister would be eight-and-a-half months pregnant. My mother says that she saw it coming for years, but she also said that about September 11th. Well, perhaps I lack my mother's foresight/prognostication skills, but nevertheless, here we were, tonight, at 5:00pm, on the back deck of my sister's new in-laws, my sister as big as a zeppelin, celebrating a marriage that occurred with bewildering speed. I was informed that it was happening last Friday, and, Tuesday night-- kaboom.

My mother, my other sister, my wife and I were all there as my father made a semi-coherent speech that managed to embarrass just about every single person present. Being Israeli, it's remarkable what he gets away with. My side of the family all held glasses of champagne from which we all pretended to sip after the marathon toast was completed. From the moment we arrived, the groom's four-year-old son bombarded his father, my sister's new husband, with one question over and over again,

"Can I take off all my clothes now?"

After the photographs were taken, his request was granted and he careened through the evening's festivities in nothing but a pair of olive-drab colored Osh-Kosh underpants.

The boy wasn't the only one celebrating this naked marriage. My sister's now exceedingly ample breasts were positively valoomping out of her blouse. It was easily the most naked wedding celebration I'd ever attended, but then, I've never been to a wedding in New Orleans.

People we appropriate, by and large. There were certainly elephants in the room a-plenty, there was even a bichon that was the size of an elephant. This fucking thing looked like more of a basset hound than a bichon, and more of an ottoman than a dog. But, in spite of the elephants and the fetuses and the things left unsaid and the sidewards glances and the whispered side conversations and the groomly debates about what to call my father, things went pretty smoothly. The kid provided ample entertainment via streaking and beating the holy shit out of a starter child's drum set in the living room. As I watched him cavorting around in his underwear, enjoying himself the way four-year-olds can, barely aware that anything significant occurred today at 4pm that will change his life forever, I was seized with a palpable desire to be him, or at least his age. I wanted to run up and down the driveway in my Osh-Kosh underpants playing wall-ball with the kids next door, or giving my broken Rock 'Em, Sock 'Em Robots to my grandfather for a quick repair. I wanted to not give a hoot in hell about what was going on with the adults in the room-- all the drama, all the tension, all the questions and the doubts and the bullshit because, as much as I like to say "I don't care" about what my sister does or how all the stupid things she does and the irrational, ill-advised choices she makes are inconsequential to me, well, that just isn't true.

I do care.

I just wish that sometimes I had the excuse of being four-years-old. Or even Israeli.

I don't know how things are going to turn out for my sister, or her new husband, or her new step-son, or her soon-to-be-born child, but I care about how things will turn out. I expressed some concerns about what was happening to my mother on the phone and she said, "It will all work out."

"You mean that we're all going to die?"

"Jesus Christ," she said.

I can't help being morbid. I've always been that way. I've always obsessed about death, ever since I was old enough to know what it was, and probably before that. Tonight, my mother asked my sister's new husband how old the furniture dog was.

"Eleven," she answered, then remarking that the life-expectancy of a bichon was around 15 years.

"Oh, well don't think about it," my mother sagely advised, which I found very funny.

"Yeah," I said, "I never do."

And then I thought about what I'd said when I saw no reaction from my sister's new mother-in-law. She was meeting me for the very first time, didn't know me from Hell's bartender. Anyone who knows me would have cracked up at my saying I never thought about death, or they would have at least given me a knowing smile. It's funny how you can lie, stone-faced to people who don't know you, and they have no idea. One day, I hope that she gets to know me, to know all of us, better.

I hope a lot of things, for my sister, for her husband, for their kids. I hope it all works out, and not just in the end.

This I Vow

While the day of our wedding is etched in my brain in a thousand images, the actual ceremony went by pretty fast.

I remember the one, thick hair that was stuck on the rabbi's right eyeglass lens, and how I was dying to say something to him about it, or to stick my finger inside there and just pull it out myself.

I remember the bees that descended on us, attracted perhaps as much by the scent of the sunflowers that adorned our chuppah as they were by the sickly sweetness of the Manischewitz wine the rabbi held. As the bees came to rest on the rim of the cup, and on his hand, his hand trembled as he tried to shake them off, spilling wine on his suit and on his prayerbook which, incidentally, he tried to use to assassinate one of the bees, by closing it inside the holy book.

I remember the bees that got stuck inside my wife's veil, prompting many bee-in-your-bonnet jokes afterwards that we pretended were funny, because we're so good natured and we realize that even lame people who make embarrassing jokes and puns need to feel good about themselves sometimes too.

I remember our vows, because we wrote them together. We wrote them on little scraps of paper after sitting in my wife's PT Cruiser in a parking lot the night before our wedding, waiting for a tow truck that never came. The tow truck was supposed to come, they way tow trucks do. The tow truck was supposed to come take away a 1966 Volkswagen Beetle, dressed in a Pearl White paint job, with red, white and blue stripes and a "53" on the doors, trunk and engine cover. We had *ahem* borrowed it from a VW dealership that was using it out front to draw in customers. This was the vehicle that, on October 22, 2006, was supposed to take me and my wife away from our wedding ceremony, onto our honeymoon, and into the rest of our lives together.

But it didn't.

It broke down twice on the night before our wedding, and we waited for the tow truck until 11pm. Or was it 11:30pm? Or 1am? Fortunately, I can't remember anymore. The point is, the motherfuckers never came, and we ditched the Beetle with a sign on it saying, "PLEASE DO NOT TOW" because, as our luck would have had it, a tow truck probably would have come at some point to take it away-- to an impound lot. Not a desired outcome.

Our vows were cute, they were individual, they were "of us." People complained that they couldn't really hear them, but we were outdoors, and, like I said, they were "of us" and they were for us, so whether people heard or not, well, it doesn't really matter. We promised to hold each other's hands when we get scared, and we've gotten scared since-- and we've done as we promised. We promised to save the last rye chip in the bag of Chex Mix for the other, and we've done that. We promised to wait together for tow trucks in the middle of the night-- ah, topical humor...

But there wasn't all that traditional muck about sickness and in health, richer or poorer, all that. But it's implied. I thought about that this weekend as I was behind my wife, rubbing her back and holding her hair back as she projectile vomited into toilets in Pennsylvania and onto lawns in Maryland. Marrying someone is when you know you love them. When you hug someone who stinks of vomitus, well, that's when you're sure.

Through sickness and health.

Check.