Language of love

In ten days I will recite a vow and make a heart-felt promise to my beloved Cristy, witnessed by the members of our family and our closest friends. I will vow to travel the journey of my life with her, seeking that path and finding our way together. These words, our promises, will communicate the strong sense of love that we share and cherish.

Planning for this wedding has been an interesting project and as we get closer to the date, the activities we are involved with on a near-daily basis are steeped in minutae.

The wedding will be in our home, and we are transforming it from an already lovely residence into something even softer and sweeter. Swirling with pretty paper heart garlands and shining candle lanterns. Sprinkled with dozens of simple bouquets of flowers and greenery. In every way, the layers of detail that will form the backdrop for our wedding are an expression of who we are. These elements too, will communicate, more subtly, the gentle tenderness with which we move through our days and nights.

This combination of words and personal expression is indeed, the language of our love.

Thrifty

Wedding day is approaching and we are beginning to ask ourselves questions like, do we have enough glasses, plates, forks? Do we know exactly what else we need for decoration?

I was talking with my mom on the phone last night and she asked: what are you going to wear?

These are all good questions and there is not a clear answer to any. Yet.

I suspect we’re a little deficient on some of these items, so this morning I went to two of the thrift stores nearby to see what I could find, within a modest budget. I don’t make it a habit to go to thrift stores, but in the spirit of full disclosure, I don’t make it a habit to go to any store except for groceries and other consumable necessities. The point is, I don’t have much of a shopping habit and I have not developed the fine art of sniffing out the excellent values at thrift stores. (I have heard urban legends about such people.) My number one objective today was to get forks.

It was a moderately successful outing. For an investment of $30 I acquired a domed cake pedestal, a pretty assortment of knives and forks, and 4 pieces of stemware that just happen to match a pair of wine glasses we already have. However, I have a feeling that a few more trips to the thrift store will be in my immediate future because as satisfied as I am with these purchases, I simply did not get enough forks.

Seriously, there were literally buckets full of dinner knives, but a true scarcity of forks. Even though I was not planning to get any knives, I had to sift through hundreds to find the few forks that I did purchase, and along the way found some very pretty table knives.

My hypothesis about this is that forks disappear. True statement? In my own personal inventory, dinner knives are indeed the most plentiful. Spoons come in second and forks sadly lag behind in third place.

So when donations arrive to the thrift store (the inventory), knives are in greatest supply.

But consumer demand gobbles up the scarce supply of forks that happen to arrive.

Thus, a few more visits (to other) thrift stores will be required to satisfy my own demand for the upcoming wedding celebration.

Plus, if I focus on the forks for a short while longer, I won’t have to worry about what to wear. Yet.

Life's busy season

Sometimes life has a busy season. Odd though, it’s been busy for as long as I can remember. That’s the baseline, but for the past 12 months the pace has accelerated. Almost nonstop. Leaping from one large-scale activity to the next, one holiday or social gathering to the next. A treacherously long list of items crossed off, one at a time. Cross off one, add two. Cross off two, add four.

Thankfully, we’ve lately crossed off more than we’ve added, but there is a very large-scale activity looming in the near future that will have a ripple effect on our list. These individual tasks haven’t really reached a critical junction in terms of an impending deadline quite yet. We’re planning a wedding. This June. 3 months away. That critical junction will soon be here.

On the one hand, it’s not a big affair, no significant fanfare. But on the other hand, it’s our wedding, for goodness sakes! We want it to be special and memorable and lovely. We’re doing almost everything ourselves: hand-drawn flourishes on each hand-written invitation, home-made decorations for the house, in-house catering (courtesy of the sought-after Cristy&Diane catering co), arranging our own hand-tied bouquets, even holding the happy event in our home.

From here, about 100 days away, it seems as though it won’t be a problem.

OK, perhaps not. But let’s look at it from another perspective. Factor in a handful of additional activities that will hit the calendar over the next 100 days, but are not on our current list: 6 birthdays, 2 graduations, 1 school choir performance, Easter, Mother’s Day, Memorial Day, Father’s Day.

Uh, well. I’m still optimistic.

I think it’s just the tempo of life. My hypothesis is that when I was younger I had less of an appreciation for the level of effort involved in keeping a balanced life moving forward smoothly. I’ve had to re-calibrate my baseline, or maybe just adjust it to compensate for this realization along with the possibility(?) that my ability to multitask has diminished through the years. Hmmm. For some reason, I seem to be OK with that.

Thank goodness I still drink coffee.

Being straight

Straight, as in truthful, not as in hetero. For the record I’m gay. Gay as in rainbow flag, not as in happy-go-lucky.

I don’t fly the flag at work, but I do have a photo of Cristy and me holding hands on my cork-board. A handful of colleagues, including my boss, have met Cristy and a fair number of other colleagues know that I am gay and that she and I are involved in a loving, committed relationship.

Last week, as I was having a casual conversation with a co-worker in our office-kitchenette, it occurred to me that he thought that I was straight (as in hetero). In my mind, I had at least a few options: (a) immediately set the record straight (as in truthful), (b) ignore it – his assumptions are his business or (c) worry about it later. My preference would have been option (a), however a variety of work-related scheduling considerations prevented me from entering into what undoubtedly would have become a somewhat lengthy and personal conversation. I defaulted to option (c).

Don’t get me wrong, I’m a firm believer in option (b) as well – allowing everyone the opportunity to form their own opinions. But there comes a time in the formation of human relationships when trust and honesty trumps the “don’t ask-don’t tell” approach. My relationship with this coworker, while not personally close, is genuinely respectful and affectionate. I like to talk with him and enjoy hearing stories about his family. I appreciate him as an individual and as a professional. He is one of the many, many reasons that I love my job. So in my mind, not setting the record straight with him about being gay is lying. I cannot envision myself lying to this individual under any other set of circumstances, so why would I lie about this?

The truth is, I won’t. I will find an appropriate opportunity to fill him in on the missing information that will assemble a complete representation of my reality. I respect his ability as a mature human to adjust to the new information and reshape his opinions about me, if that is what he might choose to do. But I don’t think he will. I give everyone the benefit of the doubt about managing gay-out news. I think of it as little more than a slice of information that doesn’t affect anyone else personally. Oh, she has 5 dogs. Oh, she’s moving to a new house. Oh, she sent out that report with all those cool graphs last week. Oh, she’s involved in a committed relationship with another female.

Am I oversimplifying this perhaps just a tad? OK, possibly, but only to the extent that I'm not accounting for the element of surprise. Other than that, I don’t think so. I’m being straight here.