Happy Anniversary to Janice and to Me Too

Today is my wife Janice’s and my wedding anniversary.  It has been several years now since we have managed to be in the same city together for this occasion.  She has been in the South since we drove down there before New Years’ Eve and will not be back up North again until the end of March when I’ll meet her in Dallas to drive back together.  She tries to get away from the cold weather each year (not always successfully) and I have to head back home to my work at the synagogue.  Meanwhile she can do her photography work equally well or often much better in the places she visits in the South.  (Feel free to check out her work at  http://www.jwfphotography.smugmug.com/.)

            Last year, for our 30^th wedding anniversary, I had great plans to get together with her to mark that milestone.  I was to fly down to Charleston, SC, meet her and together we would drive to Florida and vacation for a few days in St. Augustine, a place we’ve never been which she hoped to photograph.  Unfortunately, the Almighty had other plans (see my last blog post) and dumped an incredible amount of snow that weekend in the central region of the country, you may recall.  So even though the Manchester, NH, airport was open for business and the Charleston, SC, airport was also open, there was no place in between where I could fly and change planes to get to Charleston.  All the hubs from New York down to North Carolina and Atlanta were shut down.  By the time they reopened, it no longer made sense to fly down to Charleston since I would have needed to turn around and fly right back home again.

            We owe this inconvenient anniversary date of February 10 to my parents (of blessed memory) who urged us to schedule our wedding in Dallas at a time which was convenient for their vacation and business plans.  My Mom was a school teacher in Connecticut and had a school vacation in February and my Dad had a cheese and gourmet food store and had plans to go with my mother to the annual Fancy Food Show to be held in San Francisco that year during her school break and his quietest season in the store. They thought they could stop over for a few days in Dallas en route to the West Coast.  So we scheduled our wedding at their convenience, at the worst possible time of the year for planning any event in Dallas.  Naturally there was an ice storm that weekend.  (That didn’t keep most of the 400 invited guests from showing up on Sunday anyway.)  A year later, we celebrated our first anniversary with a large crowd of synagogue members once again.  It seems that it fell on the night of the synagogue’s annual Chevra Kadisha (burial society) dinner, a major annual event that we were expected to attend though it was hardly an occasion to celebrate.  A picture of the two of us from that night still sits on my desk in my office. (Boy, we were young then!)

            We have considered choosing another date for our anniversary arbitrarily that would be much more convenient.  After all, the Queen of England, though born in April, celebrates her birthday in June each year when the weather is presumably warmer.  There is a Talmudic precedent as well that we find in the Tractate of Rosh Hashanah.  We’re told that the first of Nisan is the New Year for Kings.  This meant that, for official documents which mention the monarch’s regnal year, the official anniversary date was Nisan 1 regardless of when he actually came to the throne.  So perhaps we should celebrate our anniversary in July or August when the weather is warmer and we are usually in the same place at the same time.

            I realized the other day that since this is our 31^st anniversary, that I have now been married to Janice for more than half of my life so far.  Surprisingly it does not seem strange that it has been this long, but rather almost unbelievable that I spent half of my life without her. It may be that after so many years together and sharing so many stories and so much family lore, viewing pictures and meeting family members our stories have merged into one long saga and her earlier years before we met have become part of my story and mine of hers.

            I won’t claim that we’ve had a storybook marriage, I don’t know that anyone does. But I truly feel that I have been blessed to have found her and to have shared so many years with her and, God willing, will continue to do so.  I also hope that she feels the same way about me, at least on occasion.

            So across the miles I send my love to my bride and wish her a happy anniversary, today or whenever we choose to celebrate it.