A Girl...

The More Things Change, The More They Stay the Same

Thirty-seven years ago yesterday, my parents met each other at a high school dance. Oh yes, it was 1969, the Summer of Love. My mom was fifteen, my dad a year older, and as I remember the story, he was smitten with her, but she wasn't really into his whole radio-club aesthetic. Apparently he showed up at her birthday party one year uninvited and followed her around the entire night and she was all "Huh? What? Who invited that guy? Make him go away."

Seven and a half years later, my dad was wearing a tan tux with a maniacally ruffled shirt and my mom was coming down the aisle with a bouquet of flowers the same color yellow as the formica countertops (and range and fridge and linoleum flooring) in the kitchen of the house they would move into together two years later and still be living in twenty-eight years after that.

Although they celebrate their wedding anniversary in October (usually by taking a trip to Vegas, the first leg of their honeymoon, which culminated in a few days at Disneyland), I've noticed in the last few years that they also acknowledge their April 24th anniversary, even if it's only to say, "Hey, it's April 24th. It's the day we met. Yay." As a person who has traditionally kept tabs on relationship minutiae like The First Time We Held Hands or The First Time We Shared a Soft Drink Using the Same Straw, I think it's cute that my parents still give a yearly nod to the day of their first acquaintance, almost four decades past.

Simon and I don't really have an official anniversary. Our getting together was more of a "process" than a contained event, so what we have instead of one special day is a list of pseudo milestones like The First Day Both of Us Remember Meeting, The First Time We Shared Sushi, and The First Time Our Eyelashes Went Up and Down and Little Stars Came Out of Us. Although I have no memory of the first time we were actually in a room together (March 2002), I do remember the first time I ever heard someone refer to him by name (June 2002) and the first time we actually met face to face (at a birthday party in an Afghani restaurant on the night the United States started bombing Iraq--March 20, 2003). Obviously, this was waaaay before we got involved romantically, so it's hard to consider those dates as significant markers of our relationship, but there they are nonetheless.

It doesn't really matter, this anniversarylessness, but I do find it strange that two people who are as attached to the past as we are don't have A Day. Nor do we have A Song, for that matter, although we've decided that in a pinch we could claim this totally unromantic pop song that I put on a mix cd for him and we later heard live at the first concert we went to together, which was attended by exactly eight other people. Aside from "when we decide to misbehave / she likes it in a nasty way" and "never gonna compromise / easier to make up lies," the lyrics are largely unintelligible, but that has never stopped us from belting out the chorus, which goes "how many of us souneernow / begaw, begaw, begaaaaw." Makes you feel all warm and fuzzy inside, huh?

So to my wonderful parents, Happy Day After the Anniversary of the Day You Met, and to Simon, Happy Day Before the Anniversary of the Day You Sent Me an Email Consisting Entirely of the Sentence "You are fucking beautiful." That's worth celebrating.