Twenty-five years of marriage is considered a silver wedding anniversary, fifty is gold, and being just ten, our own is supposedly aluminum. My source for this information additionally reveals that three years is a leather wedding anniversary, five is wood, and seventeen is furniture - apparently pertaining to the sort of gifts one might expected to receive on such occasions. I have no idea which theological system the list is derived from and I'm pretty sure it's not in the Bible. Aluminum is a silvery non-ferrous metal which I referred to as aluminium during those admittedly rare childhood conversations about silvery non-ferrous metals. Aside from my having given up on attempts to check my own slow sideways drift into transatlantic English, it seems that aluminum was the original spelling and pronunciation, give or take some small change.
The important thing is that Bess and I have been married ten years, and today is our anniversary. We've both been on diets of late, Bess with the keto, and myself with the keto except where potatoes are available; but otherwise eating nothing all day, fasting until the evening meal. For me, this is only a variation of how I lived during most of those twenty years as a postman so it's not really a major deal and I've shed a couple of stone as a result, leaving me better qualified to tell my doctor to stick it up his arse next time he sends me a whiny message about cholesterol levels. However, because it's our anniversary, we've agreed to ignore our ordinary self-imposed daily regime and start by stuffing our faces at Sonia's on the Nacogdoches Road. We once ate at Sonia's every Saturday lunchtime, which is probably why we both needed to go on diets in the first place, but it's been a while. I order the migas plate, just like in the good old days, and it seems like the greatest migas plate I've ever had.
Actually, we start the day by waking up. I give Bess a couple of anniversary presents - a book called Wow, No Thank You by Samantha Irby and a mug featuring Freddie Mercury looking histrionic against a backdrop of the union jack. She likes Queen, and she likes English stuff - which has worked out well for me, obviously. The book had a bunny on the cover and seemed pretty funny from a quick glance in the store - Jenny Lawson's Nowhere Books on Broadway - so that was that. I'd considered buying jewellery but the antique place, also on Broadway, seemed prohibitively expensive, particularly given that their definition of antique extended to late eighties issues of Marvel's Black Panther comic book, ninety dollars each at the store, but a mere three if you have a look for them online.
Bess's present to me was tickets for the No Limit Records reunion show at Cedar Park, which has been cancelled due to the resurgence of coronavirus, so I guess we'll be doing that next year some time.
Meanwhile back at the anniversary, having stuffed our faces at Sonia's, we hit the road because even though it's fucking hot, it would be too weird to stay inside on this particular day despite the appeal of air conditioning. We drive to Victoria, nearly two hours to the south-east in the general direction of the coast, because we went there before and saw bunnies at the zoo. This time, the bunnies are fewer in number which would seem to contradict my understanding of how rabbits work, but we realise that the rabbits we're looking at are a quarantined group. There's just five or six of them, at least two of which clearly have the snuffles - here referring specifically to pasteurella which can be occasionally fatal, or which some rabbits can live with but which never fully clears up if they have it. Hopefully the other rabbits are elsewhere.
The other rabbits are indeed elsewhere, but it's fucking hot so they're all inside their apartment sized hutch. However, the lemurs have had babies and we spend at least half an hour watching them. Victoria zoo generally specialises in indigenous wildlife - coyotes, raccoons and so on - but we don't mind. One of the keepers attending the lemurs has a conspicuously non-American accent. It's difficult to place and sounds like Northern Ireland to me, but is later revealed as Glaswegian when I ask. As usual, there isn't actually much to be said beyond the revelation that neither of us are from around these parts.
I've never been to Scotland. I begin to tell her that I once had a friend called Gibby who was from Glasgow, but being as the conclusion of the anecdote is that I couldn't understand a fucking word he said either and that we eventually fell out due to his being a gigantic arsehole, my testimony reduces to awkward mumbling before I get to the potentially offending section.
We drive back via Goliad, then head to Guajillos for dinner. Having grown accustomed to one meal a day, neither of us are massively hungry but it's our anniversary. The meal is oddly underwhelming. I usually order mole poblano but my lack of appetite has resulted in curiosity regarding other parts of the menu, specifically to the Mexican version of schnitzel. It's actually good but is kind of dry and surely should have come with some kind of sauce to set everything off. A young man with a beard and ginger hair sits alone at the table next to ours picking at his tacos and watching something on a tablet, so I decide it's his fault. On a positive note, our waitress seems to have calmed down since we were here last - which was presumably her first day.
As we return home, almost back at our own street, a tiny black kitten darts across the road in front of the car. We stop and get out, because he seems a little small to be running loose. We follow him behind bushes and through front yards as evening falls, hoping we don't look too much like potential burglers. Someone comes out to see what we're doing, then points to the house across the street.
'I think she has kittens over there.'
I go and ring the doorbell, then end up having an awkward conversation through a speaker system because the woman isn't opening her door just yet. She doesn't have a cat. She does, however, occasionally feed a feral cat which hangs around in her yard, and the cat has had kittens.
I rejoin my wife. She has caught the kitten and is holding him as she talks to the other neighbour. It turns out that Bess has known the other neighbour at least since when, as a teenager, she used to babysit her son. The son recalled my wife as having been his favourite babysitter. I remember the story from some previous telling, back before we realised these people lived just around the corner from us.
The woman who feeds the feral cat finally emerges from her home so we compare notes, and I find myself thoroughly confused; but the important detail is that we're going to take the kitten home, seeing as he's feral and tiny. We tell ourselves we're going to get him fixed and maybe find him a home, but we both know we'll be keeping him. One more isn't going to make much difference, we tell ourselves, and it doesn't. He seems happy and gets on fine with the other cats, and as kittens go, he's relatively trouble free. We try to think of a name relating to having found him on our tenth wedding anniversary, but nothing suggests itself. Bess proposes Goliad as an elaborate semiotic pun on historical events in the town we passed through coming back from Victoria, combined with our previous black cat being named Bean, all of which would take too long to explain; I suggest Vic as short for Victor, which is the masculine of Victoria; but the kid wins with Oliver, which I like because it can be shortened to Ollie, which additionally makes me think of Oliver Hardy.
So that was our tenth wedding anniversary. It wasn't anything spectacular, but then it didn't need to be because the last ten years have been very much their own reward, as such requiring no additional sprinkling of glitter.
We ate.
We saw bunnies.
We have a kitten.
We've been married for ten years, which have undoubtedly been the best of my life. I couldn't ask for more.
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