Chicks Dig The Long Ball (and other things that make me smile)

My favorite Met David Wright's performance at the Home Run Derby (second place!) was just one of the things that made me smile this week.

It's also our wedding anniversary. Thirteen years ago this week, it was a hundred degrees and the humidity was almost as high. It was a week of frayed nerves and tried patience as a man and a woman tried to put the final touches on their wedding. Which included a seating chart that would satisfy two sets of divorced in-laws. Which included coordinating many, many relatives from out of town. Which included sending the best man, already grumpy, on a scavenger hunt for wedding favors (a hundred and ten Pez dispensers). Which he brought in a box into our tiny apartment, then dumped the contents of the box, unceremoniously, onto the floor, leaving me, already frazzled with final gown fittings and sewing seed pearls onto my sneakers (a blog onto itself), to remove a hundred and ten tiny sticky price tags from each of the plastic baggies in time to make the UPS cutoff in order to have them to the hall on time.

And we'd yet to create the cake topper. We still have it on a bookshelf in our home. Onto a standard plastic platform, we'd hot-glued one Charlie Brown Pez dispenser (hand-crafted by Husband to look like him, down to creating tiny glasses with the wire from a twist-tie) and one Lucy Pez dispenser, made by me.

We, like Lucy, were all crabby, cranky, and ready to yank everyone's football away just as they were running down the field with that look of determination on their faces.

And then the weather broke.

And it was a beautiful day at the wedding castle on the river.

And a hundred and ten people showed up to watch the bride walk down the aisle 45 minutes late (for the record, she was ready. She was ready even though her cousin-in-law, the hairdresser, realized halfway upstate that she'd forgotten her dress. Even though her sister-in-law dropped a lipstick, which slid, business end down the length of the wedding gown, while doing the bride's makeup. Even though the florist screwed up and delivered the eight thousand (it seemed) boxes of flowers into her dressing room, where there was barely enough room for the big damned dress and the seven or eight women who hovered around waiting to help yet nobody brought her the Diet Pepsi she'd asked for a half-hour earlier.

She was late because of the rabbi. Who schmoozed around finding two people who could write their name in Hebrew (guess it's part of some tradition, or something).

And then the glass was broken, and hundred and ten people, relieved from the sudden break in the heat, ate the food that I never got around to trying (too busy having pictures taken), danced to big band music and told us it was the best wedding they'd been to in a long, long time.

And our wedding night consisted of eating pizza (neither of us got to eat the food that everyone else told us was so wonderful) with two good friends who'd come for the weekend.

Not a bad way, all told, to start a marriage.

My mother, cleaning up her house, found my gown and asked if I wanted it back (now that I live in a place with enough room, I think it's time) and speculated whether I should get it dry cleaned. "There appears to be a lipstick stain," she said.

No, I told her. Like the wine spilled on the ketubah, like my uncle's videotape that mostly showed the ceiling, that stain, like certain Clintonian artifacts, is part of history.

The good parts of our marriage would take up many, many blogs. But to make a long story a little shorter, how else, other than sharing a heart and sometimes a brain with someone else for nineteen years (the official years and the unofficial years) how could else could it lead to conversations like the one we had this morning.

Me: What's this sudden media fascination with world leaders and their preferences in American pop culture?
Him: Huh? (he hadn't had coffee yet)
Me: Well, that guy from Japan went to Graceland and I just heard that Kim Il Jong likes Daffy Duck cartoons.
Him: A lot of people like Daffy Duck cartoons.
Me: Yeah, but Daffy's the schlemeil in the story. Bugs is the cool one. He always gets the upper hand. It says something about him that he prefers Daffy to Bugs.
Him: So, we're judging world leaders on what cartoons he likes? I bet Kim Il Jong likes the Stooges.
Me: Yeah, probably Saddam Hussein does too. I bet they both like Moe.

So Happy Anniversary to my husband.

And I hope we have many, many more silly conversations left to go.

And maybe next year David Wright will take first in the Home Run Derby.