eleven years ago today . . .

She Says: get this dress off me, now

He Says: honey, ya gotta keep the dress on, the reception hasn't even started

Twenty minutes after that photo was taken, the dress was gone and I was in faded levis and a white tank top. Thus, the hundreds of photographs taken at our wedding have me in jeans. What on earth possesses someone to be so perverse? I ask you, sincerely-- please, analyze this-- it is PERVERSE.

I'd like to say it was some kind of rejection of patriarchal ceremony (see, I've tried my hand at analysis, too), but I can trace the perversity back to a time long before this wedding. In fact, I can trace it back to one of my earliest memories (as I was 3 at the time) and to another wedding-- my aunt's.

All I remember is standing in some strange driveway in a dress with layers of crinoline (the thing that itches your little legs and was designed by some sadistic pedophile who wants to see little girls sit and move in pain) while my whole family, dressed to the nines, drove away in our red station wagon. It was a terrible feeling and I'm sure it has scarred me with issues of abandonment for life--Feh.

The next thing I remember is standing in a small laundry room next to a warm dryer and being helped off with my dress and this woman telling me I could wear her son's dungarees. Last thing I remember from that day was being barefoot, in dungarees and a t-shirt and running out into the backyard and feeling like I was the smartest kid in the world.

Cause as family lore has it, I was such a screaming, unrelenting, nightmare about the dress and the white socks (which were always folded under at the toe cause they were my sister's and too big for me and is there ANYTHING more annoying than ankle socks folded under the toe?!!) that my mother in an absolute fit of rage with me and desperate not to be late to her own sister's wedding-- left me with my grandmother's hairdresser for the day.

And the moral of the story is?

You can be a nightmare of a child, an alien wretch of an adolescent, a moody, brooding, totally-lost-and-fucked-up-in-the-head 20-something and STILL meet the man of your dreams and bewitch him into thinking you're none of those things at all and spend the most intensely happy 14 years (though only 11 of them are you in "legal" love) of your life and look forward to spending every day with a man who is just so damn smart and funny, a man who never ceases to amaze you with the breadth of his creativity or the depth of his kindness. So that if you stick with him long enough, maybe you'll become a better person and less of a wretch (but we're not promising anything-- we're just saying maybe).

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