marinelli's miscellany

What I remember most about the first wedding (besides the Justice of the Peace saying, as my husband describes below,  “If I’m not marryin’ ‘em, I’m buryin’ ‘em!”) was what a huge hassle the dress was; despite its relative plainness (it was an L.L. Bean thrift shop item which I’d pulled out of the closet that day), it was not nursing-mom-friendly; I had to leave our few guests, go upstairs, and get almost completely undressed to feed Annalisa, and the timing of that relative to the Justice of the Peace showing up was kind of dicey, and I was all “HOLD UP, I GOTTA PUT MY BOOBS BACK IN THEIR SLINGS,” etc.

thunderdolt:

2001

Continued from my earlier post, 2000.

Today is @vmarinelli & my 11^th anniversary. I married @vmarinelli in 2001. This is my 2001^st post.

We actually have two anniversaries per year. We were married by a Justice of the Peace in January, then we had a kick ass coffee house wedding in May.

@vmarinelli and I met in 1984 in 8th grade, when I was 14 and she was 13. It turned out we had met much earlier, when we were 4 and 3. A few months after meeting her in 1984 and forming a well-founded crush, she and her mother moved to Hawai’i. We kept in touch, albeit barely. In 1990, she ended up back in our home state Virginia, where I was still living. We ended up spending that summer together. At the end of that summer, she went back to college, and I went on my partying way. She stopped in VA in 1992 on a summer tour she was making, and we caught up as only friends. I had a girlfriend, and she’d rather have a girlfriend than a boyfriend at that point in her life. A couple of years later I tried to get in touch with her through her aunts, however found out that no one related to her knew how to get in touch with her: Vikki had dropped off the face of the planet. 5 years later in 1997, I received a surprise phone call from her. She was alive and safe! She had a daughter, and had experienced as much of Minnesota as she needed. I had a 2 bedroom apartment that she could move into rent free until she got on her feet, starting over in Richmond, VA. We rekindled our romance from 1990, and her daughter became our daughter. Although we had a relationship setback involving me asking to dissolve it, she told me in late spring that she was pregnant. We almost completely split up in late 1999, but reconciled in the 11^th hour. We had our 2^nd daughter in early 2000. Due to corporate world reorganization, Vikki lost her job, leaving her without insurance. This was a problem. We now return you to your regularly scheduled program.

Our youngest was almost 11 months old. Vikki and I knew that we were working out great as a couple, as well as a family. We loved each other, and times were good. Originally we had decided that we would wait to get married at least until our youngest was 1 year old, so we were sure we were marrying for love, not for any shotgun reasons. (Actually, while I’m rather large, I can still move faster than her dad can aim!) We were going to get married. I had my oldest come shopping with me to help me pick out a matching set of engagement ring and wedding bands. I had officially asked, and Vikki wore the engagement ring. Vikki called me one day in early January while I was at work and asked me to find out how soon her insurance coverage would begin once we got married.

The Human Resources rep told me Vikki’s coverage would be effective the day we got married. I dutifully reported that to my fiancé, and asked her to call the county and find out what all we needed to do. I had seen in movies and on TV that a marriage license needed to be issued, blood tests were needed, blessings from the church of rabbi Buddha, permission from your 3^rd grade teacher, and so on. I thought, “It’s January 4th. We’ll probably be able to get everything in order right around our youngest’s birthday, so she’ll be a year old, which is exactly what we were aiming for. Awesome.” Vikki called me back. The clerk at the county had told her we could get our marriage license THAT DAY, no blood tests or hard-to-find people from the past necessary, and be married as soon as anyone licensed officiated the wedding. The clerk gave her a number of a Justice of the Peace for hire. She had called him to see what his schedule was like and he asked, “Well, what are you doing today?!”

That same day was A BIT soon for either of us! So, we booked the guy for 2 days later, Saturday. He scheduled us between a funeral and another wedding. “If I’m not marryin’ ‘em, I’m buryin’ ‘em!” he would say at our wedding. We made some calls to a few friends and family: “Got plans for Saturday? You do now!” We were joined at Vikki’s aunts’ house by her aunts (after all, twould’ve been rude to have the ceremony at their house without them!), my parents, our 2 kids, my good friend and his fiancé, and another good friend and his boyfriend. I don’t think it was insulting to the 2 same sex couples there. In 2001, I don’t think any state allowed same sex marriages. One day this kind of concern will seem like an ancient memory. I was glad they were there, because those folks were some of the most important people in our lives. It was a great wedding.

Our JoP was in interesting fellow. Vikki explained that while JC was a great guy and learned teacher, he wasn’t explicitly necessary in our service. It was cool to talk about god, but JC wasn’t someone we were dying to include. Apparently, no service is a service by this JoP without JC. AND he went on forever. Somewhere I remember thinking. I do. I do! I DO! I FUCKING DO! CAN I KISS THIS WOMAN YET?! JESUS CHRIST, MAN!” The picture at the top of this post is one from a long series of the ceremony. That’s our oldest holding the bouquet.

We were married! Oh. Shit. We were married! The next month we celebrated our youngest’s 1^st birthday. Then in March, my employer told me they were laying me off. In a month! They needed me to keep up the good work until my official last day. Just. Fucking. Great.

Despite my lack of employment, we decided to have a party wedding. Vikki was happy with the 1^st wedding, however she had a lot of family spread across the country, and both of her best friends were out of the state, so she wanted to share this change in our lives with everyone we could. The majority of her writing in 2001 was focused in poetry, so where else should we have our wedding than Ashland Coffee & Tea in the Center of the Universe, Ashland, VA? We got in touch with the folks there. We would be their first wedding! They served beer, so I could rest assured none of my friends would riot. Unfortunately, as is our procrastinating nature, we didn’t actually schedule with them right away. We soon began receiving harassing phone calls from friends and relatives: ”We need to know WHEN the wedding is, so we can book plane tickets, hotels, etc.” Geez, stress us out some more, would ya?! Finally, we chose May 27^th, and let everyone know where and when to come celebrate.

Vikki’s mom still lives in Hawai’i, so she made arrangements to have beautiful Hawai’ian flowers flown in. We had a lei-making party at my parents house the night before. You should be able to see some of the leis in the picture above. My wedding party consisted of 2 men and a woman, and Vikki’s consisted of 2 women and a man. It worked out great! Our youngest snored loudly through some of the ceremony. It was awesome! One of Vikki’s aunts officiated the ceremony, so JC wasn’t talked about. A good time was had by all! The woman in my wedding party is one of my ex girlfriends. Later, I signed the Ketubah at her wedding (a document in Jewish weddings where representatives who are not related to either the bride or the groom sign that neither is getting married by force, or unwelcome arrangement), and I was in each of the other guys’ wedding parties. The woman in my wedding party and I are the only ones still married.

Years later my youngest was talking to my mom. She said, “Grandma, I know how families happen.” My mom and I were very curious to know her impression. “Well, a couple meets. Then they fall in love. Then they have a baby. Then they get married.” Damn straight, baby girl, damn straight!

Yeah, we’ve had struggles. Who doesn’t? I love this woman. There’s a lot more story since we got married. You’ve already seen some of it here and there. Stay tuned for more. Thanks for reading along!

Happy anniversary, baby!

For any of you who may have missed my husband’s recent series on our entirely unlikely/ obviously fated partnership, it’s pretty damned sweet.

[SORRY NO, I CANNOT CLONE HIM.]

thunderdolt:

1997

Continued from my earlier post, 1992.

I met @vmarinelli in 1984 in 8th grade, when I was 14 and she was 13. It turned out we had met much earlier, when we were 4 and 3. A few months after meeting her in 1984 and forming a well-founded crush, she and her mother moved to Hawai’i. We kept in touch, albeit barely. In 1990, she ended up back in our home state Virginia, where I was still living. We ended up spending that summer together. At the end of that summer, she went back to college, and I went on my partying way. She stopped in VA in 1992 on a summer tour she was making, and we caught up as only friends. I had a girlfriend, and she’d rather have a girlfriend than a boyfriend at that point in her life. A couple of years later I tried to get in touch with her through her aunts, however found out that no one related to her knew how to get in touch with her: Vikki had dropped off the face of the planet.

Every once in a while I thought about Vikki. I tried to forget about her for a while, but then I found the pair of earrings she had left at my house in 1992. They were a bit too dangly for me, so I took the french hook off of one and safety-pinned it to my leather jacket, so I’d always remember her, and when people asked me about it I could tell them the story. You never know: Someone with whom I spoke might have run across her. Here’s a picture from 1995 where you can see the earring on my jacket.

I had some disastrous relationships, and apparently so did Vikki. In 1997, completely out of the blue, she reached me by telephone. I had moved to Richmond, VA, and she had moved all over, and was in Minneapolis, MN. I thought maybe she had hung onto my parents’ phone number all these years, and had gotten my number from them. Nah. Instead, she had a feeling that I was in Richmond, and had called information for my number, choosing Richmond first. I didn’t owe too many bills then, so my number was still listed. She told me about her life, and I was so glad to hear from her. I was thrilled she was okay, especially when she filled me in on the incredible and harrowing things that she had experienced (her books are coming). As it turns out, between all the people from her past, I was one of the only people she could think of with whom to get back in touch.

Our conversations became more frequent. We discussed how she might just need an opportunity to start over, and that I had a 2 bedroom apartment in which I lived by myself. She could come here, and get on her feet. I hoped that she might have room in her life for a little romance, but she really needed this chance to start over. She had a little girl, but things weren’t working out there with her now ex girlfriend, so mostly I wanted her to have somewhere to go. I didn’t want to jeopardize her level of comfort and make her think I might become lecherous by telling her how these conversations were stirring feelings in me, that I found her to still be intriguing and wonderful.

In my 1990 post, I described how she had exasperatedly said, “Do I have to make ALL the first moves?” Apparently, she would. During a phone call when we were finalizing her plans to fly to VA and I would come pick her up from the airport, she pondered to me, “What if I still have feelings for you?” I paused. My heart skipped a beat, then leapt into my throat. The only thing I could think to say was we would handle that when the time came. She told me that she had changed: That maybe I wouldn’t find her attractive, because becoming a mother does things to a woman’s body. I cared about her, and I wanted her here. Besides, she was beautiful, she must still be.

I stood at the gate at Dulles Airport (remember when everyone could go through security so you could meet when they got off the plane? Yeah, this story is THAT old) and watched what must have been 2,000 people deboard the plane. Then no one else was getting off. What if she missed her connecting flight? It was a 2 hour drive, and cell phones were economically prohibitive in 1997, so she couldn’t have reached me while I drove. No, I think this flight was direct. What if she changed her mind? What if she wasn’t coming after all? Then she appeared. She was wearing a houndstooth dress. Remember I said above she was concerned I wouldn’t find her attractive? I knew people who had run into ex-lovers who had changed drastically, for the worse. WRONG! She is beautiful! See the photo at the top of this post! The rest of the passengers had to walk around us as we kissed right there at the gate.

We drove back to Richmond. I said the apartment was tiny. She saw how tiny it was. We figured each other out over the next week. We were having a good time together, but she was also missing a big part of her life.

(I need to explain before continuing. Our oldest daughter is “our” daughter. She has a different genetic donor than me, however she’s been in my life and I’ve been her dad since she was 3 1/2. It was alien to me to write the following “her daughter,” instead of “our daughter,” but narratively it’s important, because I hadn’t even met this incredible part of my life yet.)

Her daughter was biologically hers, but she had left her daughter in MN with her ex girlfriend. This first visit was scheduled with a return flight a week thereafter, because we had to make sure this thing developing was right, and Vikki had a car in MN. She flew back to MN, and I was a little worried she wouldn’t return. The first phone call I got from her when she got back told me she was definitely coming back. Moving across the country to move in with someone you haven’t seen in 5 years is sketchy enough, but taking a kid who’s never met him was a little more than she wanted to submit her daughter to. When Vikki drove back from MN, her daughter continued to live with Vikki’s ex girlfriend. We spent the next couple months hanging out and having a good time, as evidenced by the picture above. It was great, but it was incomplete without her daughter. After a couple of months, Vikki needed to return to MN. Her plan was to return working for a quadriplegic there whose assistant after Vikki left had moved on to another job. She would make some money, square up final affairs, and after I came there to meet her daughter, if it worked out that the 3 of us could get along, she and her daughter would move back to VA.

2 months later I flew to MN for a week for Vikki’s birthday. That’s when I met my daughter for the 1st time. I think it’s safe to say this picture demonstrates we got along extremely well. This is from the Mall of America’s ferris wheel:

3 weeks later Vikki and her daughter boarded a train in MN and made the trip here. Our life together began. Of course, as usally, I really screwed up: I was supposed to have demonstrated I was ready for daddyhood by procuring a bed for the 2nd bedroom for her daughter. When I picked them up at the train station here in Richmond, I had failed to do that. Poor kid slept on the couch! We went together and got a bed later.

I told her daughter she could call me anything she wanted. Jeff would do. Not too long after we all began living together, she asked if she could call me dad. She’s been my kid every since then. I’ve been Vikki’s Hunny Bunny since then. I’m an only kid, so for my mom to be a grandmother, I was kind of her Obi Wan. My folks took to our daughter quickly. Our getting together was a really good idea! The next summer we moved from that tiny apartment into a house. 1997 was the best year of my life.

I love Vikki. We’ve had good times and bad times, and we’re still happily together. Vikki slowly got back in touch with some old friends and family, and made some new friends. I introduced my world to my new family. Things went forward.

In 1999 Vikki and I had a major setback, and I actually asked her to move out. This led me to a point where I made a phone call to my mom. I explained we were having difficulties, and we might not stay together, but that our daughter loved her Grandma, and I wanted to know if she could still see her Grandma if Vikki and I split up. My mom hung up, and wouldn’t answer my calls for days. Sometimes my mom has to process information before she can deal with it. There was a small possibility, due to genetic technicalities, that Vikki could deny me seeing our daughter. It was, of course, very unlikely, but both my mom and I might have to go on without her in our lives.

We were still living together in 1999, but struggling, when Vikki came to my office to tell me some really important news: She was pregnant! But that’s another story.

This is my 1997th post. To be continued in my 2000th post.

YOU GUYS, A SNEEZING MONKEY.

[via]

GOOGLE AUTO-SUGGEST, YOU ARE ALWAYS MAKING ME SO SAD

SYNCHRONICITY LOL

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DM, September 26, 2009.

:(