Kurt R.A. Giambastiani

This coming weekend, my wife and I will celebrate our thirty-fourth wedding anniversary. Ours has been a good marriage which, despite our many flaws and foibles, despite our misjudgments both large and small, has been a source of strength and comfort to us both.

Oddly, though, we don’t have any traditions for celebrating our wedding anniversary. That’s not to say that we are tradition-averse; far from it.

Every January 29th, at 7:29 PM (Pacific Time) we raise a glass and toast a man by a name not his own. “To Fred,” we say, a thank you to Bob, my wife’s former boyfriend. The date and time are significant, as it was in that moment, backstage at a ballet production of “La Boutique Fantasque,” we first made eye contact. We toast “Fred” (aka Bob) because, without his influence, my wife would never have relocated from her home in the south SF Bay area up north to where I lived, she would never have joined the ballet company for which I danced character roles, and thus she would never have been backstage at 7:29 PM putting on her stage make-up while my friend and I sat across the room, and, seeing her, I asked “Who is that?” Fred/Bob was crucial to the events that preceded, and so every year, we thank him for his service.

Another tradition is that, on February 14th, we go out for Mexican food. It’s not like we don’t go out for Mexican food any other time, but we make a specific point of going out for Mexican on St. Valentine’s Day. It’s the anniversary of our first date (it took me a couple of weeks to wear her down). She met me at my place of work in downtown Mill Valley, and we went out for lunch at the local Mexican restaurant. As a ballerina, my wife was able to eat a prodigious amount of food with great gusto, which I found thoroughly endearing (even when she accidentally got a mouthful of her long strawberry blonde hair along with her burrito). By that time, I’d already told her that I was going to steal her away from Fred/Bob (I told Fred/Bob, as well), and had pretty much laid out my plan for our lives together. In other words, I did everything wrong, things that today would get me on a stalker watchlist, but nevertheless, either due to my boyish charm or my undeniable chutzpah, I eventually convinced her that I was a better bet than Fred/Bob. Now, every Valentine’s Day, we commemorate that first shared meal (though usually sans the side dish of strawberry blonde hair).

It’s not like we forget our wedding anniversary (though she usually misremembers it as being on the 31st, when it’s actually on the 30th). It’s just that there isn’t any one activity that can embody the culmination of our long courtship, the stressful build-up to the wedding, the drama-fraught day itself, and the transition from two lives into one, ’til death do us part.

For our first anniversary, we stayed at a super-hip B&B on the Mendocino Coast, near where we honeymooned. For our fifth, it was dinner at the Space Needle. For our tenth, a weekend getaway in Manzanita, Oregon. On our twentieth, she got the proper diamond ring she’d wanted for so long, and five years later, she upgraded to a bigger stone. Our thirtieth was a mixed bag, as her mother died that day; needless to say, we didn’t do much celebrating on that anniversary.

Now we’re at thirty-four years, over a third of a century, and still we have no tradition.

But I’m OK with that.

Not having a traditional way to mark the event seems fitting. We’ve changed so much over the decades, and the dynamics of our lives continue to shift so much (sometimes daily, it seems), that it is impossible for any one “thing” to encapsulate, symbolize, or properly commemorate all the places, all the spaces, all the emotions, all the experiences that comprise us.

I suppose our tradition is not to have a tradition. Maybe our tradition is to let the mood sway us, to give free rein to the serendipitous idea, to allow who we are and what we feel in that particular moment guide us as to how we might best celebrate what has turned out to be, for me, the best decision of my life.

We’re still kicking around ideas for this year’s anniversary. Neither of us is in a place where we want to make a big deal of it; with all the changes currently playing out, we need rest more than we need a big splashy to-do. We each have a movie we want to see (War for the Planet of the Apes for her, Dunkirk for me), and we’re toying with the idea of each of us picking a restaurant to go with it (any restaurant, no restrictions), along with a drive or two in Pepper (a belated present she gave to me for our 30th).

The non-tradition continues.

k