Happy Happy, Joy Joy

It's around this time of year that I find myself looking to my wife and asking her, "Do you remember what we were doing x number of years ago?" Of course the variable in this equation is the number of years that have passed since our wedding. Presently, that would be seventeen. It's not a traditionally recognized anniversary in terms of its commercial significance. Those who have a stake in such things would like to sell me furniture or amethyst, or perhaps furniture made from amethyst. But I won't be swayed. Not this time.
Instead I would rather spend a few moments wallowing in the memories of the day, or rather the days leading up to the moment we "made it legal." There was a baseball game, where my friends and hers took in the contest between the newly formed Colorado Rockies and the San Francisco Giants. For the record, the Rockies were hammered that night, and my best friend's fiance made the mistake of loaning a very special pen for one of our less-than-invited guests to keep score who lost it. Box score: Rockies 10, Giants 4, Pen 0. The next day was full of rehearsal, featuring the hijinks of the groom and his best man getting into an angry tussle about whether Certs was a breath mint or a candy mint. Then we all drove back down the mountain to have dinner in my mother's back yard. Afterward, there was a trip to the swings at Scott Carpenter Park in which childhood was reveled one more time before the nuptials.
Then came the day we had planned and anticipated for months. The cake melted on the ride up. The bride had a raging case of poison oak. I forgot my pants. The items we had planned to have on our little altar in the meadow were left behind as well. So were our rings. Everything turned out perfectly. My dad loaned me his pants, my older brother and sister-in-law loaned us their rings, and my younger brother put it best when he began his reading with the words, "Oh no! Oh no! Oh no!" It all came off as most beautifully and most gloriously planned, to paraphrase Tracy Samantha Lord. Just like the last seventeen years.