Our Fourth Anniversary

Well, here are two people I love very much.

(Why am I naming days?)
09/18/15, Day 14,380 (Mercena Day 399): Our Fourth Anniversary

I’ve had a hard time keeping up with naming days here, and that’s too bad, because the days have been interesting. It’s been a sometimes satisfying but mostly frantic month, and I’ve been feeling always at least one step behind, which makes reflection here seem like a luxury.

But I do need to stop and acknowledge our fourth anniversary. Our wedding day exceeded all my expectations (which were anxiously high) and really was the best day of my life until Mercena was born (those days are now locked in an amicable tie). Looking back at that day now, it gives me solace and strength, and the reaffirms the deepening love I feel for Heather. It centers our love and my life in the way I think weddings are supposed to do.

Our plan last night was simple. We walked to our favorite Forest Hills restaurant, Jack & Nellie’s, with our wedding officiant Kelly staying at home to watch the sleeping (and still teething) Mercena. We had drinks, appetizers, and dinners like normal people. We remembered favorite moments from the wedding (like when I dropped our vow scripts on my long roundabout walk to my processional entrance, and spotted them in the grass at the last possible second), talked about our daughter, and then, miracle of miracles, made it a good twenty minutes not talking about our daughter. We drank rioja and riesling, appetized on olives (freakishly good) and artichoke dip, and dined on salmon (Heather, not veggie-me) and vegetable risotto (can a risotto be refreshing? Cuz this risotto was like creamy spring (weird)).

Then we took the long walk home through the fancy part of Forest Hills. It was a perfect fourth anniversary, and after a difficult week at work, a night of renewal (hence getting back in the blog saddle).

Two other things to share before I start working on all my overdue projects. Mercena has been a marvel this past month, and a few of her quirky new behaviors must be recorded in the book of life (or at least this blog):

• Google Search pointing: She now wants to know what everything is, and will point and go “ehh” to be told what different things are. It’s the old school Google Search.
• Nosies offstage: When she hears a nice for which she can’t trace the source, she points in the general direction and goes, “ooh,” to alert us to the mystery.
• Shirt stuffing: Her favorite game for about a week was to drop toys down our shirts and then have us shake them out. Why? Who can say? But it really was fun, minus the chest hairs of mine which she inevitably ripped out in the process.
• Zerbert-ing: I’m not sure anyone else in the world calls body raspberries “zerberts,” but I for some reason do, and Mercena has long delighted in me giving her stomach zerberts. Then, one night while she was breastfeeding during bedtime, she got this mischievous look in her eyes and gave Heather an enormous zerbert on her stomach and then looked up expectantly. Of course, we both burst out laughing and then so did she, and we played that game until we were all laughed out.

Lat thing to share: I’ve completed Chapter Five of After Earth, one morning subway ride at a time. It looks like it takes me around a month to finish a chapter with those half hour  subway bursts on the weekdays, around a half page a day. I wish I had so much more time to give this book but even that little touch makes a difference. It feels like a prayer to me; a little candle of creativity in a sea of obligation. I haven’t worked seriously on a new full-length play in almost a year, and beyond writing short plays in support of various projects, I don’t see myself starting a new full-length play anytime soon. I don’t expect that break from writing plays will be forever, but at the moment, I can’t really see where there is to get to.

Thanks to this book, however, I feel renewed as a writer. There’s an odd voice that’s telling me, “this is what you should’ve been doing all along.” I don’t trust that voice yet, as I’m suspicious of simplicities that makes things the wrong kind of easy. But let me not hold on too tightly to the thing I was and miss the thing I could be.

It looks like I might need to spend more time reflecting here, deadlines and obligations be (momentarily) dammed. But for the moment, I’m just grateful for my amazing wife, and the strength and joy of our marriage. Here’s to four more years, and the forty-four more after that.