In Celebration of Marriage

That diamond ring is a precious thing,
and we never want to lose it.
It's like the words to a song that we love to sing,
every time we hear the music.
It's like a rainy night in candlelight,
And oh it's so romantic!
We got the whole thing working out so right,
And it's just the way we planned it.

We're in this love together. We got the kind that lasts forever.
And like berries on the vine, it gets sweeter all the time!

--Al Jareau, "We're in This Love Together"

This has been a monumental week for marriage, especially my marriage, which turns 30 years old on July 2, 2013. The song quoted above was played for our first dance, and aside from actually losing my diamond ring (and then finding it a few months later and then losing it again, possibly permanently now :( , we have been blessed to have that kind of marriage and then some.

We met when I was eighteen, and within a few months, I had decided Bob was the one for me. I think it took him a bit longer to come around (he had been engaged previously, and was still reeling from The Breakup). but from my point of view, he was cute and kind, his family was nice, and we had a lot of fun together.  That is one of the great benefits of marrying young --- you don't over think all those things like money, careers, children, what does this mean for our taxes, etc. You just decide you're going to make it work and you assume it's possible to do that. Bob never officially proposed but when I was 20, during my sophomore year in college, we were shopping for china for one of his cousin's weddings and he saw a pattern he liked - Noritake's "Limerick". It was on sale and he suggested we buy 12 place settings on credit and take turns making the monthly payments. Hmmmm. Sounded like a partnership and a commitment to me! I agreed immediately! We bought the china and ended up getting married two years later, about three weeks after we'd made the last payment. I still have every piece, and we use it as often as I can make an excuse to pull it out off the cabinet.

I was a little lost planning the wedding, since my mom had died a couple years before, I was still in college, and my sisters lived far away and were busy with their own lives.  Juggling final exams and wedding invitations, making catering and facilities arrangements, and planning the wedding ceremony all by myself was really hectic. Our wedding date was only two weeks after my graduation, and I needed to also move out of my college apartment, find a new place to live, and move our stuff into that place, all between the date of graduation and the wedding.  Oh and one other thing, neither of us had a job!  That is the benefit of being madly in love-- you just don't stress over little things like that.  Our parents, on the other hand, stressed ALOT.  My dad, brother, and sister tried to convince me to wait, while Bob's dad had a friendly chat with us, which started out with, "Well kids, you know you can't live on love alone."  Really? We seemed to somehow find a way to do just that, scraping by with our little savings account and living off all the thousands of bags of rice our friends had poured into every nook and cranny of our new apartment while we were on our honeymoon. I found remnants of that rice for years!. And boy did that rice look nice served up in our beautiful new china!

Even today I remember each line of our wedding vows, and I am so deeply honored to have married my best friend and a man who takes those words as seriously as I do, promising each other 

To have and to hold
For better or for worse
In good times and bad
In sickness and in health
For richer and for poorer
To love and to cherish
Forsaking all others
Until death do we part.

Love you Bob and sorry it's taken over a year to finish writing this post!

Response from my sister Claire:

On Aug 13, 2014, at 8:11 PM, "minimunchkyn@comcast.net" <minimunchkyn@comcast.net> wrote:

Really liked your marriage post. I celebrate marriage too...even though at times....never mind!

You really are a glutton (gluten!) for punishment planning the wedding so close to your graduation, etc. but I knew you would pull it off.

I think back to your wedding and the Crow Canyon reception once in a while: Rick trying to keep Briana happy during the wedding where the whole wedding party could see him struggling in the cry room, your wedding party laughing at jokes during the wedding, me forgetting my camera in my car at the church and realizing it when we arrived at the reception, Briana sleeping soundly on a blanket in the corner during the reception with a vibrating floor and music off the charts, Jack getting drunk on Gimlets, Aunt Amelia (and Aunt Ann I think) watching Briana while Rick and I danced. And also I remember the get together at Aunt Jackie's house. Oh and also Rick, Briana and I flying up with Dad in his plane. Rick looking white as a ghost whispering to me during a dip during turbulence when the plane dropped..."Is is supposed to do that???"

Fun times!

Claire

The haves and the have nots

I just spent a weekend in Mariposa and couldn't help noticing the differences between the haves and the have nots up here. Mariposa is a small town with only about 2000 residents, and even though the county was originally the largest of California counties in terms of geographic size, population, and income (when it was the center of California's gold mining activity) it is now one of the most sparsely populated and poorest counties of all.

Bob and I are lucky to be one of the "haves", as the PG&E inspector noted when he came up to our property to assess our request for underground power lines."You folks aren't from around here, are you?" he twanged. "You know how I can tell? You have all your teeth." And so it started - I began noticing the haves and the have nots all over town. Tom, the owner of the electrical and well supply store, was definitely a have not - all his lower teeth were gone, until he took a trip one summer to Latvia and got a whole new set for a fraction of the cost of 1-800-DENTIST. The Burger King employees are haves. They know how to read between the lines of the employment solicitation posted on the drive-through window. It reads, "Are You Good Enough To Wear the Crown?" Dental crown, that is. It's not explicitly stated, but they all know what it means. The sign on the front door might as well say "No Shoes, No Teeth, No Service."

I was walking down the main street yesterday after finishing dinner at the local pub when a group of Japanese tourists disembarked a bus returning from Yosemite. Suddenly I noticed a woman unabashedly taking a picture of me. What? Ok, sure, I was covered in red dirt, but that's because I was digging in my garden and I don't have a house to clean up in. And yes, I was wearing boots and hoisting myself into a 2 ton pickup truck, but I needed the boots to make sure I didn't get bit by a snake when walking through the tall grass on our property, and I had to drive Bob's truck because I needed to shuttle him and his friends on their rafting trip down the Tuolomne. Ok, fine. I guess it's conceivable in some stretch of the imagination, that an unschooled foreigner might have mistaken me for a closet redneck. Obviously she didn't notice that I had all my teeth, and they were straight too, and Crest-white-strip enhanced. What is she, blind??? Enduring the humiliation, I quickly opened the car door and jumped in, after picking up the half empty bottle of Bloody Mary mix which rolled off the car seat and into the street. Don't look at me like that! It was left over from a morning break while sea kayaking the day before on Tomales Bay. I didn't have time to clean out the car because after kayaking we went to the beer festival, got home late, and then came straight up to Mariposa at 6 the next morning. And NO! That chew on the dashboard doesn't belong to me! It's Garen's! Whatever. Take your stupid picture. I have better things to do than worry about what some tourist thinks. Like purifying the well. Or cleaning up the mess left on my road by Glen's cows. Or siphoning the septic tank. Or something.

Don't be Afraid of the Dark

It's been a long time since I've posted on this blog, mostly because I've had a hard time feeling inspired about something interesting to write about.  I am up in Mariposa, alone, while Bob and friends are making a spring run down the nearby Tuolomne River.  The river is a class IV and always fun but challenging. As I sit here alone with my dogs, next to my campfire, I am second guessing my decision not to join the trip. I've done the river many times, and this was a good water level (2500 cfs - enough to cover many of  the wrap rocks but not so scary that you'd need an extra dose of blood pressure pills and a vallium for good measure).   But then I think about Clavey Falls and that rock on the left side of the chute that always dislodges your oar right when you need it most, or the salad toss at the end of Ram's Head where Lisa nearly broke her arm, or bridging on Sterns or Bette's swim through Hell's Kitchen, and my little lonely campfire doesn't seem so bad anymore.

Actually, my campfire is pretty nice, as you can see from the picture below.  When making it, I considered all those things they teach the boy scouts - get some tinder, make a little teepee of sticks and stoke the tinder until it ignites the sticks. When it's nice and hot, add additional kindling and some small logs, eventually building up to some nice size logs which will really make a bonfire you can be proud of. But then, I decided that the girl scouts are much more pragmatic, and having been a loyal, cookie-pushing scout for several years, I grabbed a small bag of charcoal and a big bottle of lighter fluid, piled a bunch of logs in the pit and doused the whole thing with liquid dynamite. Voila!  Instant bonfire!  It's a relatively warm night, but the fire serves the purpose of driving away the mosquitos and gnats, especially if you don't mind acting like a piece of trout in a smoker and sitting downwind. 

The dogs are enjoying themselves tonight.  Someone's cow is taunting them from the other side of the fence, and they are responding by growling and barking, but are too lazy to go running after it. (I know how they feel).  Besides, they're having too much fun harassing frogs and lizards which seem to be everywhere this evening (one was even on the toilet seat - good thing I saw it in time.  Would hate to think of the alterntive outcome there).  I even saw a snake today on the road.  I really wanted to run it over once or twice or even three times, but I knew Bob would be disappointed in me so I held back. As it is, he is going to ask me all kinds of questions about what kind of snake it was, which I won't be able to answer, since I didn't crush it to death and then get out of the car to check it out.  Now I'll dream about it making its way up my hill and slithering under the door tonight.  I'm sure with its evil snakish sixth sense, it knows I really wanted to kill it.  I might have to sleep with the shovel tonight, just in case.

Speaking of night time, the sun has just set. It was another gorgeous orange-pink-red sunset which I didn't photograph in time because my ipad was out of batteries and was still charging.  I caught the tail end of it, but the picture doesn't do it justice.  There will be a waning moon tonight, about 3/4 full so star gazing won't get good until the middle of the night. Hopefully I will be sound asleep by then, not huddling under my covers, terrified, (did I mention I was alone?) wishing I really did have a shovel, and Jeff's .45 along with a few large clips of soon-to-be-outlawed ammo, and also for good measure, Blake's bear repellent.  Of course, if someone did try to break in, I can just imagine the chaos. I probably would end up stepping on the shovel, with its handle springing up to hit me in the head, then accidentally shooting the dog, and finishing off by tripping on the now disabled dog and landing on the pepper spray nozzle, taking a full blast to the face. Only to find out it was just the wind blowing over a chair on the porch.  Ok, I think I'll retreat to the little love shack for the night. This sitting around by the blazing fire, very alone, in the dark, with lots of little glowing eyes watching me, is so over. 

End of the sunset, start of a night of terror........

OK, I am psyching myself out here.  I need to stop this talk of intruders and go back outside to shut the garden gate, or else there may be nothing left after those predator-deer attack en masse tonight.  Where are my shoes?  and flashlight?  And scarf (there are a lot of bats and all those urban legends about the bats getting entangled in your hair are running through my head)?  And butcher knife (just in case, you never know when it might come in handy)? And cell phone? Where is my phone?  Should I pre-program 911 in, so I only have to hit one button? I wonder how long it would take the police to get here?!  To find my phone, I'd have to turn on the light in the little chalet I'm hunkered down in.  That would certainly give away my position to the stalkers outside.  Oh what to do, what to do?  OK, here goes -- if I never write another word, hopefully someone will read this post and know what my last minutes were like. 

Phew!  Made it. Didn't even need to brandish the knife. Good thing, because the blade is pretty dull.  What can you expect when you buy knives from Rite Aid?  Shoot!  I just remembered that I forgot to take my antibiotics.  They are out in the car. It's parked soooo far away, almost 30 feet from the door.  Where did I set down that knife?  and the phone?  Another lonely sojourn into the bat-infested blackness.  I hope I don't step on a frog outside the door and slip and land on the knife.  Maybe I should make a pre-call to 911 to let them know where I am, saving time in case I have to actually make an emergency call later on?  Do you suppose they can store that type of information?

OK, made it, but it was close!! Those bats were in attack mode - I am sure of it.  But I watched "Attack of the Giant Hare" last week and learned that furiously waving your knife in the air disrupts the bats' sense of echo location (and also scares away 50 foot leporids).  That is some mighty useful information, after all.  You never know what you can learn from late night TV, Dr. Ruth aside.

If any of you read this tonight, and wish to call me to say what might turn out to be your final goodbye, feel free!  I will have my cell phone fully charged and waiting at my bedside, next to the shovel and knife.  Goodnight, and its been great knowing you!