Happy anniversary baby

here's to forgetting a million more

There’s something that Rick and I have consistently done since our wedding in October of 2013— forget our anniversary. Every year like clockwork, one of us looks at the other at some point on October 6th and says, “Hey Baby, I think it’s our anniversary!” 

We get a good laugh out of it, give each other a kiss and a hug, wish each other a happy anniversary and send our thanks upward for yet another year together. No special night out, not even typically an out-of-the-ordinary dinner home since we haven’t planned anything. Thank goodness we are like-minded. There are no hurt feelings, only gratitude for each other.

Our forgetfulness becomes funnier as the years pass. Blame it on aging. We were fortunate enough to be married by a dear woman Tracey Walsh, who just happened to be our next-door neighbor in Montara. She’s a lady of many talents and interests, one of which is photography. She creates beautiful cards using her photos and sends one each year on our anniversary. I always keep a collection of her cards on hand to send out to others on special occasions.

Last year as I retrieved the mail from our mailbox (the boxes are located at the corner of our street), I opened her card walking back down to the house. I realized it was Tracey wishing us a happy anniversary, and I thought, “Why is Tracey sending us an anniversary card NOW? She must be mixed up.” 

It wasn’t until I walked back in the door that I realized it was October 6th, our anniversary. I shared the card with Rick, who also had no clue as to what day it was. We once again laughed at ourselves, gave each other a kiss and a hug, wished each other a happy anniversary, and sent our thanks upward for yet another year together.

With our laughter following us throughout the day, this year turned out to be an anniversary to remember.

Rick often holds his phone up to show me something he thinks is interesting or funny on whatever site he’s visiting. He likely does this at least once a day, on average more like five times a day, and on a busy day, up to 20 times. Sometimes I’m in the middle of reading something or busy writing, and I get a bit irritated to be interrupted, but then that little voice in my head says, “hey girl, how lucky are you that he even wants to share this with you?” 

Yesterday morning at the breakfast table, he began laughing and lifted his phone toward me. He was showing me a FB message from our dear friend Janet.

I looked back and forth between the screen and Rick a few times until I finally asked, “And?”

Like, what’s the point of this? Who is that for? 

Rick’s still laughing. 

“Wait, what day is this? Is it our anniversary?”

Sure enough, we were celebrating yet another anniversary unawares. We split a gut laughing at the breakfast table. That may well be our most precious gift, the ability to laugh together through thick and thin. Rick responded to Janet, thanking her for reminding us about our special day.

We hugged and kissed, wished each other a happy anniversary, and sent our thanks upward for yet another year together. Some things thankfully don’t change.

Later in the day, Rick asked, “honey, do you want to go out for dinner?” 

I replied, no, maybe another time. We had a local refrigerator repairman coming mid-afternoon, so we’d planned to pick up some take-and-bake pizza and use our new Ooni pizza oven. 

“Let’s just stay with our plans. We’ll go celebrate another day.”

The repairman leaves, and we scrounge for cheese in the 2019 refrigerator that still isn’t fixed (the repairman has informed us that Samsung has a well-known problem with ice-makers. He suggests we just buy a countertop ice maker. Really?) We find some crackers in the cabinet, and we go all out— Rick has a whiskey, I pour my favorite wine, and we settle in to do a jigsaw puzzle with an old movie playing.

Happy anniversary, baby.

An hour later, we get after that pizza. We had ordered two small pizzas from our new Cool Local Pizzeria. They looked like this when we took them out of our partially-working refrigerator.

We did a little homework (apparently we should have done more) on techniques for cooking pizza in our new little Ooni pizza oven. We had a few hiccups transferring the pizza to the paddle. Then, even more significant issues sliding it off the paddle into our Ooni oven. We aborted the whole effort and switched to our kitchen GE oven, which actually still works after three years… kudos to GE! And to be clear, no slight on the Ooni oven. The problem was clearly operator error.

Here’s what the combo pizza looked like before we finally got it into our GE oven. Yikes.

And here’s our anniversary dinner, an intact overcooked Margarita pizza on the left (our bad), and a combo pizza on the right, a little worse for the wear, but pretty tasty.

Happy anniversary, baby. I hope to be forgetting our anniversary for many years to come.