i'm gonna make you love me, i'm gonna dry your tears

by mg at 10:36 PM on August 17, 2004

I’ve always meant to tell this story here, but I don’t think I ever have.

As you might be aware, I’m recently married. By recently, I mean since November. So, it is only recent if you consider something that happened nearly a year ago to be recent. It doesn’t seem that long though, which is a good thing. I’d rather feel I was married just yesterday than wondering when I woke up each morning how long my nightmare had lasted, and how I was going to stand another day with my harpy of a wife.

Luckily I don’t have to worry about that. I’m gloriously happy. I think we might actually still be technically considered in our “honeymoon” period, but we’ve been together for the better part of a decade, and have a kid, so lets be serious about that and say the honeymoon has been over for quite a while.

Though we’ve only been married for less than ten months, we should have been married for a year, last Saturday. Last summer Amanda and I had our “elopement” all planned out. We’d fly down to Miami, where we had reserved some space in her family’s time-share resort. We’d hop on a plane Thursday, walk into the courthouse, get hitched, and then walk out to the beach to spend a couple days of our “honeymoon” soaking up the sun, Cuban food, and all South Beach’s gay culture has to offer a hetero couple .

But, the day before our flight was scheduled to leave we were walking around Steinway Street doing a little last minute shopping when the power went out. It didn’t occur to us that anything was wrong. “It is summer,” we thought, “sometimes the power goes out.” Especially when all the stores on Steinway run their A/C with the shop doors open, cooling each doorway from an otherwise unbearable 90 degrees, to an otherwise unbearable 40 degrees.

We walked home and the power was still off. With no TV or radio, the news began to filter, through our neighbors, that the power was out for most of the eastern seaboard, Michigan, and parts of Canada. For some reason, we still didn’t worry.

The next morning, with the power still out, well, then we began to worry. We don’t have a phone that doesn’t use electricity (and seriously, they say to keep candles and food around in case of a blackout, but you would be well served to keep a non-cordless phone around too), but I was able to use my laptop (running off batteries) to check out the airline website to see if our flight was actually going to take flight. The website said it’d be taking off on time, which seemed a little south side fishy, but we trekked out to the airport anyway.

The night before had been pretty creepy sleeping in a totally dark and quiet apartment, in a totally dark and quiet city. You’d think you wouldn’t notice the lights are out at a time you’d normally have the lights out, but you do. Well, it was even creepier driving down Astoria Boulevard to Laguardia Airport and seeing no traffic. No traffic lights. No people, pretty much. It was like an episode of the Twilight Zone.

We got to the airport and, of course, our flight was cancelled. The airport had no power, and no ability to update their website. Which we totally would have realized if we weren’t such pie-eyed optimists, hoping our plans to be united in holy matrimony (by the Dade Count Clerk-of-Court) weren’t heading down the crapper faster than a quart of ice cream melts in an electricity-deprived freezer.

We didn’t end up leaving NYC until two days later. We tried not to take the Blackout as a sign that the universe was telling us, personally, that we shouldn’t be getting married. But, how can you not?

We decided maybe this eloping thing wasn’t for us, and were sitting in a bar drinking mojitos and eating crab cakes while beginning plans for an actual wedding.

But then we got knocked up, and changed out plans again, so our beautiful child wouldn’t be born a bastard.

Last Saturday, August 14th, would have been our one-year wedding anniversary. Instead, it was our 262 dayiversary, and the day of our Wedding Vow Renewal. Which, I’ll have to tell you about tomorrow.