Crazy Eights

Eight years ago today, I walked down an aisle in a dress I'd bought on Melrose Avenue--the very first dress I'd tried on--and held hands with Baroy and spoke vows and merged lives that were, to all extents and purposes, already merged. Still, it felt profound. It was profound.

I still remember so many details of that day. We did what I like to call an invisibly cheap wedding...while we spent a good amount of my stepfather's money and a couple of thousand of our own on food and a 'real' hall and flowers, we went with a DJ instead of a band, and we had a videographer, but asked him just to turn over the raw footage at the end of the day. (After all, neither of us really needed the sappy background music he'd have added later, and he might have cut some key moments that we now really cherish in that overly-long bit of film.) And we didn't have photographers, but rather put a bunch of disposables on the tables and let people have at it. It was fun. We have zero photos of the wedding party and only a few of the wedding ceremony, but we have all these great, happy, amateurish shots from the party, and everyone was represented in them, and we didn't have to miss half the fun posing out in the garden.

I remember Baroy's best man, Don, being wonderfully solicitous of me. I remember him noticing that there were trash cans visible outside the panoramic windows just beyond our chuppah, and going out there and moving them himself so I wouldn't be upset by it. I remember my sister, swollen with nearly eight months of pregnancy, waddling down the aisle as my matron of honor. I remember the rabbi--my step-uncle--calling me Linda, which is my mother's name. I remember signing our ketubah and our civil marriage license in green ink, in honor of St. Patrick's Day.

I remember the mountain of shrimp and the lake of cocktail sauce in the room they ushered us into after the ceremony was over--a 'gift' from my stepfather, who knew of Baroy's fondness for shrimp cocktail. I remember how bubbly and sweet the champagne tasted when I kissed it off Baroy's lips.

I remember the two of us deciding that we didn't want to miss the cocktail hour, and so we sneaked into the room where it was held, and everyone pretty much ignored us, because we hadn't been 'officially' introduced yet. I remember walking into the reception hall, transformed from a chapel in under an hour, and just grinning wildly. I remember having the Best Time Ever at that party, surrounded by people I loved.

There's so much more, too. Little gossipy moments, like when Baroy danced with his friend J, who has a tendency to be inappropriate, and our friends staged an intervention just around the time she was shimmying on his leg. Significant moments, like when my Uncle Sy said the blessing over the challah, the only one of my grandmother's siblings to be able to make it to the wedding. Funny moments, like when the clueless DJ took that significance and made it a travesty..."Amen, ladies and gentlemen, amen," he intoned in his very best AM-radio baritone. Oy.

Eight years later, we've had a couple of rough moments. There have been a couple--but only a couple--when I've wondered about our viability, wondered whether I wanted to be in this relationship. Mostly, though, I'm happy, and grateful, to have found someone with whom I fit so well. Baroy laughed at the card I gave him this morning, which said something like, "You don't complete me, because I was already complete, but you make me more, and you make me better." But it's true. It's not like I wasn't a real person until I got married. But I'm a much different person now, a much better person. And I think that's better than completion. I think it's more real, and more lasting.

I love you, Baroy. Happy eighth, even if you won't be reading this...