Just because something's right doesn't make it easy.
That's all.
]]>A little voice inside my head said,
]]>A little voice inside my head said,
"Don't look back. You can never look back."
A day late, but for once, perhaps not quite a dollar short.
We are not date-obsessed people. We have spent anniversaries apart over the years. We passed 'couple' and 'handful' and are rapidly lazing our way toward double digits, and yet ... here we still are.
Perspective says how utterly young and naive we were on that day. We probably haven't learned much, but at least we have a mortgage to show for it.
The photos from Day Zero hang in the hallway, and every year they become a little less true, a little more representative of past rather than present. I thought of the wedding photos I grew up seeing in other houses, and wondered if the people in them ever thought about taking the photos down because they were so old, so out of date.
I looked at ours just last week while Adam visited, and realized the attrition of time is catching our photos, too. Gone: the minister who performed our ceremony, and the man whose arm I am holding in the practice march. The classic 'geeks in the wedding' photo has one of our last photos of a childhood friend of Jeff's who is now gone as well.
Every other person in that photo has changed. Kara has children. Brad got married. Dan and Stephanie got married. Eleanor had a breast reduction. We all look older than the brash barely-twentysomethings we were in that photo.
And yet ... here we are, you and me.
I write every year on our anniversary, looking for the ineffable something that will sum up life, marriage, and the relentless 365-stepped march of time, and this year I have no better explanation of why we're here, or why this has worked.
We were young, and we knew everything; we are older now and we only know enough to be dangerous.
We shared lunch at a deli with Adam, during which, halfway through my muffaletta, I turned to you and blurted, "Oh yeah! Happy anniversary!" I had taken a partial day off to savor the last few hours of our unexpected houseguest's visit, but you headed back to work.
We, Adam and I, debated what we should do in the hours we had left; we opted for the geek simplicity of wandering Best Buy and a bookstore. While he wandered ahead, I ambled my way through the sci-fi and asked myself how I would write up this day, knowing that whatever I wrote would stand in lockstep with prior anniversary entries as a testament to the passage of our time.
Don Henley played over the speaker, softly sliding words we've played dozens of times before back into the forefront of my brain. How many times have we commented on this song when it came over the radio or one of us played its album on our stereo system? I've lost count, and, I suspect, so have you.
Given the passage of time and mingling of experiences, it becomes harder and harder to guess where we might have been now without the other's influence in our lives. We've thrown our lives in together for so long that I think it impossible to guess where we would have gone alone.
Happy ninth anniversary, Jeff. Sorry for this being a day late. I meant to write this on the day of, but falling asleep into my book at eight p.m. rarely bodes well for getting entries posted on time.
]]>"If there's ever been a good time for this, it's now…"
]]>"If there's ever been a good time for this, it's now…"
—me, to Jody, 7 July 2006
So here's the story that's been on the back burner for a month now.
When I prepared to fly to Florida, part of the packing preparations meant securing on-plane reading material. I'd been breezing my way through Jacqueline Carey's 'Kushiel' series, only to stop dead at the beginning of the fourth book because it had just come out in hardback. I read fast, and I didn't want to buy it in hardback.
So, knowing that the book had just been released, I decided to check my library's website to see if I could put a hold on the book, so that I could check it out and take it with me.
It was one-thirty-two in the morning.
Me: "Hey. May I borrow you for a moment?"
Jody: "Sure. Especially if it is for nefarious means."
Me: "I have something I want to run past you, and please, please promise me you won't laugh."
Jody: "I won't laugh under any circumstances."
I showed him the link. His response was simple: "That is right up your alley."
I spent the next morning making phone calls and tracking down information I hadn't needed in a long time, and the end result was me throwing on the black dress and the lucky red shoes and wandering down to the library and tossing off a couple of sheets of paper that landed much more easily than they were created.
I said goodbye to you all knowing that I had an interview scheduled for when I came back. I told very few people because I didn't want to get your hopes up. When the interview rolled around and it, too, went extremely well, it became even harder to keep my mouth shut.
I sat, I waited, and the days sludged from one to another in silence. They called my references, with each call getting longer and longer. I wondered if I'd be able to hold out, to say nothing until I knew the results of my actions.
I rarely speak of the dichotomy in my background; the confusion inherent in being a literary geek. I'm just geeky enough to help the literary folk out, and I'm just literary enough to help the geeks talk to the artsy folk. I've never been completely at home in either place. I know of people who changed majors in college at the drop of a hat, but for me, my switch from English lit to information systems was a sea change born of immense frustration. I'd begun to realize that I'd never be wholly at home in a literature department, and I hoped that the change would give me a 'home.'
It wasn't the case, but it ended up being a slightly more marketable degree.
It never even occurred to me to ask if there were other people like me. Silly me. I should've asked my friends, because the reaction to my telling them that I am the new webmaster for my county's library system has been unequivocal: "Oh my goodness! That's perfect! Why didn't we think of that before?"
So, yes. That's me, and that's my news.
In return, I sent Jody a present that had meaning for us—a set of jade chopsticks. With it, I sent a note: "Others believed, but you were first."
If this new chapter has a name, it's "the lipstick librarian."
]]>"When I come to terms … to terms with this
My world will change for me"
—Tori Amos, "The Beekeeper"