Riddles of a Happy Un-anniversary

I don’t know why I invoke the Mad Hatter. There’s the long banquet table set with fine china and silver for the tea-party. There’s the ridiculous little man talking in riddles. There’s the Disney version with the song that wishes a very merry un-birthday to you—but at that teaparty there is the giddy child’s wonder of having 364 fun, regaled un-birthdays and only one dull ordinary day in a year, while my un-anniversary remains a single un-fun day. Still, I think the Mad Hatter belongs at the table with me, especially this day that would be the 30^th anniversary of my failed marriage. I think there should be an empty banquet table presided over by some magus of riddles where the divorced can go to celebrate the anniversaries that are not real, but do not go away even so.

Of the 30 years my un-anniversary does not celebrate, only twelve were spent married, leaving 18—more than half—un-married. The man I un-married has had two subsequent wives, making our un-marriage seem all the more disorienting. And yet I woke up the morning of my un-anniversary and found myself announcing to all my giri buddies what day it was. They loved my star-crossed stories about my groom and how he almost died the night before we married, from cellulitis caught from swimming in a stagnant pond after blistering his heel wearing my father’s golf shoes (symbolic!). They loved the story about how the wrong flowers and wrong wine were delivered mere hours before the big event, and how my often helpless mother mustered rare cunning and charisma to insure the right flowers and right wine were found elsewhere and delivered in the nick of time. They loved the story about me wearing my mother’s satin gown with long train, and how I’d grabbed a glass of red wine at the reception just as someone was rushing up to hug me, and spilled the wine down the front of my dress so that it looked like I’d been stabbed in the heart so that no one dared photograph me. They loved the story of how, because my groom had spent the night before the wedding in the hospital on an IV drip of antibiotics, we had to be rushed from the reception—no dancing allowed—to the resort hotel on that lake in Eufala so he could elevate the foot as soon as possible. We had not eaten all day and my poor sick groom asked me to go out and find him a hamburger. I was night blind and knew nothing about the town of Eufala, but drove around and drove around until I found a convenience store that sold Chili dogs. But of course by the time I got back to the resort hotel, my sick groom was dead asleep. That did not, however, explain why he took off his wedding ring in his sleep and threw it across the room. He told me it had happened utterly unconsciously; his finger just wasn’t used to being bound in rings.

“If I may be discreet,” Zia Paola interrupted me as I was narrating this story of misadventures, “When was this marriage of yours consummated?”

I sort of chuckled and explained to her it hadn’t needed to be consummated because we had lived together for three years before we made it official.

“Ah,” she looked at me knowingly. “No wonder you’re divorced. Your marriage was certainly born under a crazy star.”

I hold no grudges against my ex-husband. Without him, I doubt I would ever have married anyone and I certainly would not have the amazing children that I have or even my grandson, Finn. Without him, I would not of course have anything in my life as I now know it. There really is no such thing as divorce, in the end. The life two people create together keeps creating itself even across great divides and distances.

Margaret, Finn and I were chatting via video chat yesterday afternoon as usual. After Finn had shown off how efficiently he eats a carton of yogurt and pulls up the pieces of his jig-saw play mat, I thought to ask Margaret if she knew what day it was. She did in fact know and claimed that she’d thought to call her father and wish him a happy anniversary but because he’d celebrated his anniversary with his third wife last week and no one had even known it was their anniversary she thought possibly it would be a little rude.

At that moment her iPhone rang and she held it up to the web-cam so I could see who was calling: John Clough. “Do you know what day it is today?” she challenged him on answering.

It seemed absolutely appropriate the way John and I confronted our un-anniversary together yesterday, conversing through layers and layers of technology—Margaret’s iPhone held up to the webcam so that I stared hard at his name while listening to his voice come alive through the infinite regress of speakers. “Thirty years, “ I remarked, still not clear what Time means in any of this. “I’m well aware,” he said with a tenderness I rarely attribute to him.

I did take myself out to dinner last night, wondering had I ever before celebrated my un-Anniversary, not remembering even remembering it before, though believing surely the day never arises when I don’t. It was nice being out alone with the marriage and the riddles and the Mad Hatter whom I swear I could hear singing.

Source: http://montelucomuse.blogspot.com/2010/08/riddles-of-happy-un-anniversary.html