Twelve Years, and, Then Again, Twenty

May 14th is our wedding anniversary. Twelve years sounds like such a long time, but it doesn't feel long at all. Marriage is still the best slumber party ever--all the lying awake talking and stupid jokes and pillow fights of the ordinary slumber parties of my childhood, only with way better kissing, and nobody's dad shows up in the morning to take us to church.

It occurred to me today that we first met in 1986. I've known my husband for twenty years, more than half my life. He's still the same boy who sent me those forlorn letters while I was in Korea. Still the same boy who pressed his barbershop quartet into joining him to serenade me--they showed up on the doorstep one night while I was staying with a family friend in Maryland, entirely without warning, and put all the old songs to work. We split up while we were in college, got back together after graduation, and then took turns proposing to each other every three months until it stuck.

The year leading up to our wedding was my first year in grad school, a year of seventeen ice storms, with bonus heavy snow every Wednesday, like clockwork, well into April--Dan was in an auto accident three days after Christmas that year, so we got to drive through the pelting ice again and again to physical therapy and the chiropractor, and then to look at china patterns and designs for wedding invitations. We meant it about marrying each other--really, really meant it. Stubbornness is a virtue. A blessing, at the very least.

Here's hoping for another seventy or so years of slumber party.

Famous Dead People

Many thanks to everyone who participated in my entirely unscientific poll about Madame Blavatsky. It looks like I can drop her name, and readers will know I'm not making up everything that goes along with it, but I'll have to handle the exposition about her just as if I'd invented her myself.

And if Madame Blavatsky hadn't existed, we really would have had to invent her. She's just too odd to miss.


Today, Stanley Kunitz is dead at the age of 100. I thought he'd outlive us all. He was a regular at the Dodge Poetry Festival (see previous post regarding New Jersey's cult of poetry). Every time he took the stage, the crowd would go wild, as much because of the spectacle of his longevity as in anticipation of his wonderful work. My poetry cronies and I figured Kunitz would be forever preserved at the Dodge Foundation's expense, perhaps cryogenically so that he'd be back in circulation when we were old fogeys ourselves, or perhaps on extreme life support as a head in a jar. Failing that, we imagined an animatronic Stanley Kunitz, sort of like the robotic Philip K. Dick. Perhaps, we thought, we were already watching an animatronic Stanley Kunitz, since he was implausibly energetic for a 97-year-old. That, or maybe the man himself was for all practical purposes indestructible, like cockroaches and Cher.

We could joke like that because his death really did seem impossible. It's hard to imagine this year's Dodge Festival without him.

Far better to imagine the escaped android Stanley Kunitz with the escaped android Philip K. Dick, hiding out in a forgotten bomb shelter somewhere, sharing a drink and taking turns at the typewriter.