Sunday, July 20, 2014

White space suits and promises

Back in the early part of 1991, while slogging through the tragic haze of my father dying, we began to plan our wedding. When it comes to dates, I love nice balanced numbers. Getting married on the 25th, or the 10th, or the 30th, those are good dates in my opinion. But having an anniversary on the 8th, for instance, or the 27th? Not for me. I don't believe numbers or dates have one bit of significance, but I just love when they look and sound good. For instance, when we were moving to Sacramento after two years in beautiful South Lake Tahoe, I was driving around getting some errands done in our soon-to-be new neighborhood. I was bummed, and sad and not looking forward to that move one little bit. Until I stopped at the post office to get our new PO box number, that is. They assigned me a palindrome, something like 804408. Wow, I thought, maybe this won't be so bad after all. Our randomly assigned number put me in a way better mood than something like 943875 would have.

So when we began to look into getting married in the summer of 1991, I had my heart set on June 1st. What could be better than a June 1st wedding date? So terrific and perfect, it was just screaming cool date on a wedding invitation. I was settled on it, June 1, 1991. Of course, June 1, 1990 would have looked even better, but that would have involved time travel and we know how tricky that can be.

We had to wait a while to set the date officially, because there would be a big conflict if our annual convention was too close on either side of June 1st. It was, and I shed a tear of frustration, along with all the other tears I was shedding for much more legitimate reasons than a good sounding wedding date. Not only did June 1st bump up too close to our convention, some friends of ours chose that date as their wedding day. So I did go to a wedding that day, but it wasn't ours. And it was hot - blazing hot and yucky. Whew, so glad we hadn't chosen June 1st, we dodged some sweat bullets on that one.

We picked July 20th. Rounded out enough, easy to remember, looks good, with that nice big zero following the happy number 2. And it was only 83 degrees (80 sounds better) in the Central Valley that day, a minor miracle for a summer wedding in Davis California. No sweat bullets, no glistening wedding photos from our pictures taken in the UCD Arboretum. And little did I know it was such an important day in world history, the anniversary of the day Neil Armstrong walked on the moon! Houston, we don't have a problem with July Twentieth.

All it needs is a veil on the helmet.