It’s October of 2012, and as Mike and I are now coming up on our two-year anniversary it seemed appropriate to tie up a few loose ends.
I did not win the HGTV Urban Oasis Giveaway, even though I stayed up all night the night before the wedding writing entry cards and addressing envelopes and filled up both our neighborhood mailboxes so completely on the way to the airport that there was no room left in them and I had to send like five hundred of the entries from Puerto Rico. In the end the contest had fifteen and a half million entries, which means that by filling out and sending all those index cards along with entering online every day I increased my chances of winning an apartment in the Residences at the W Hotel, if my math is correct, from 1 in 256,410 to 1 in 3,846. Fortune chose not to smile upon me, however, and the apartment went to some college kid in Florida who claimed to have entered only once. I’m not sorry to have made the attempt, though; it makes me feel like I haven’t completely lost the ability to tilt at windmills.
Apple juice, I discovered not long after the wedding, is a perfectly acceptable substitute for wine according to even the strictest interpretations of Jewish law, so there are no problems there and I can still think of the Japanese Hill and Pond Garden as Eden.
After our Brooklyn wedding ceremony, unlike after our ceremony in Iowa, I do feel married. I call Mike my husband and feel that I’m telling the truth. I don’t know that I would feel the same way if I lived in a state whose laws, unlike those of New York, didn’t recognize marriages of same-sex couples, but, for better and for worse, I don’t really have any way of finding out, because the answer sure as hell isn’t interesting enough to be worth moving back to South Carolina.
Our long string of not suffering as a result of marriage inequality was finally broken a few months ago, when the IRS sent Mike a letter telling him he owed $16,000 more in taxes than he’d paid.
“Oh, my God, honey!” I said, full of excitement, when I understood why they wanted what they wanted. “We’re being discriminated against because we’re gay married!”
(My excitement might have cooled significantly had a few phone calls not cleared the issue up, but they did. There are a lot of same-sexers, however, who are not in a position to joke about things like this.)
The day after we got back from the honeymoon I walked into the kitchen with a bag of groceries. After I had taken the pasta and the vegetables out, after I’d put the dairy away, after I’d eaten less of the ice cream than I wanted to because I knew Mike would be annoyed that I’d eaten any but if I left a lot then he would get over it more quickly, I went to the stove and reached up to get a pot to boil the water in.
And there, sitting on the shelf, were the pot and pan lids that had been missing since I dragged them into the basement along with everything else in the kitchen years before. They shone as brightly as they had the day I bought them.
“Where did you find the pot and pan lids?” I asked Cathy on the phone as I chopped a tomato.
“What are you talking about?”
“Our pot and pan lids have been missing for years, but you obviously found them when you cleaned up after the party and put them back with the pots and pans. Where were they?”
“Joel, I didn’t find any pot or pan lids.”
“But you must have, because here they are.”
“Are you sure you didn’t get too much sun in the Caribbean?”
When Mike came down for dinner, I asked him, and he had no idea where they had come from either. “Maybe we should call your mom,” I said, “and get her to ask 28 what he thinks.”
“No, because he’ll just say they were where they needed to be.”
“And then yell at us for not talking to him in so long.”
All I can think, really, is that the pot and pan lids had lain in wait for years until they could return as some sort of metaphor about marriage or completion or healing.
Or maybe they just appeared when we were ready for them.