marriage

Normally, here, it is words. If you are following me on twitter or facebook, you are aware that something is very wrong in my world right now. So instead of words, I give you this:

A quick entry of two notable photos.

After a not-so-good day, Jeff hands me a little package and tells me to open it. Inside I find Moleskine’s Paris city notebook. [what is it?] I see the ‘CDG,’ for Charles de Gaulle, and I burst into tears, for his spouse is a fountain pen lover who adores little perfect notebooks like these and who is very very nervous about going to Paris alone.

"Make your notes here," he says. "It won’t be the last time you go to the city."

I may not have him with me on his trip, but suddenly I have city maps and addresses, and I have a spousal good luck charm.

My smile blossomed at ten after four, when he walked in the door, unexpected, early.  I had commented to Adam online a bit earlier that there was something calm and perfect about the afternoon: the raging storm; the slanted lamplight across my laptop; the soft sound of snoring, geriatric cats.  Suddenly, it was better.

Jeff smiled as he put his bag down and said, "Stacy sent us all home."  He put down his string bag of water bottle, lunch remnants, and snacks; he took his place on the other couch and I paused from debugging.

"I don’t know what it is I want tonight," I said, "but I want to do something a little different.  I just don’t know what."

"Why don’t we go out to dinner?"

Coming home from my mother’s wedding, with thoughts of Washington and Arkansas and Alabama mixing reluctantly in my head like oil and water, the thought hit me. Last Q standing.

I was sitting to the right of Geof, enjoying an Over the Rhine concert that he’d talked me into attending, when I saw my silenced phone light up. The number implied Arkansas, and I had the familiar lump of dread that always came when a number starting with 501 showed up on caller ID.

It was my mother, and thanks to the ongoing performance, I had no way of answering it before the phone would go to voice mail. I watched, and waited, and saw no new voicemail notification pop up. No message.

When the musicians took a break, I called my mother back, and Geof was the only witness to the look on my face, whose look he told me later was quite priceless. The news? My mother’s engagement.

Sarcastically muttered near the peanut butter: “Holy shit! Thanksgiving is this week? Why the hell didn’t anyone tell me? When did this start getting scheduled in late November?”