Ten Years

Time plays funny tricks on the mind. I’ve heard it said in regards to raising kids that the days go slow, but the years go quick. When I was younger I noticed that a journey always seemed to take longer than the return trip. And there is no doubting that as I get older, the weeks just seem to fly by faster and faster.

However, today has nothing to do with kids, travel or the perception of time. Today is the tenth anniversary of my marriage. That means on this day all the way back in 2001, Mrs. Fussy stood in front of our friends and family in Berkeley, California and said, “I do.” Technically, she said, “Li” since the important part was apparently in Hebrew. But you get the idea.

Oddly, it feels both like an impossibly long time and almost like no time at all.

Ten years is the amount of time from my very first memories to my bar mitzvah. It’s the time span from starting seventh grade until college graduation. But it’s also only half the time since the original release of Nirvana’s Nevermind.

Mrs. Fussy and I aren’t terribly sentimental and we don’t make a big deal about anniversaries in general, but we do enjoy our traditions. The one thing we do every year is remark how glad we are not to be having a wedding today. And our wedding was great. Let me tell you a bit about the food.

We celebrated over Sunday brunch.

Brunch was a big part of our pre-married life. We were regulars of a restaurant-café in Berkeley called Le Bateau Ivre. On nice mornings we would sit outside on the patio, on colder mornings, we would sit in the back by the fireplace. It was lovely.

Believe it or not, I wasn’t that concerned about the food. We found a caterer that had worked with the temple, and created a brunch menu of items that could be made well en masse and wouldn’t suffer from being either pre-made or from sitting out during the wedding.

This meant cold poached salmon, frittate, bagels, and the caterer’s famous Mediterranean spreads. Frankly I wasn’t expecting to have an opportunity to eat. So I picked my battles.

One was the cheese platter. I made explicit instructions for the caterer to supply very specific cheeses. After all, my love for the stuff was well established prior to our wedding. And I was not about to serve our guests substandard cheese. Regrettably, my memory is fading but fromager d’affinois and Humboldt Fog were surely two of the selections. I do remember the caterer sneaking another lesser cheese into the mix, “for color.” But I got what I wanted, so I let them have their mediocre bright orange cheese.

The other was the cake.

Our cake was one of the most decadent parts of the wedding. We splurged based on the assumption that even if we didn’t get a chance to eat any food, at the very least we were guaranteed to have a bite of the cake. So we went with the best baker around, a fellow who used to be the pastry chef at the Ritz Carlton in San Francisco. And it was a beautiful cake, iced with butter cream and filled with lemon curd and raspberry. The flavors were bright and summery.

With brunch there were mimosas galore. There was also more sparkling wine, rosé, and white wine than people could drink. That was marvelous, because our caterers had agreed to pour the wine we had bought for the event. So all of the unopened bottles were packed up and sent back to our apartment. We had a grand old time drinking though the sparkling wine over the first year of our marriage.

But it was neither the food nor the wine that made the wedding special; it was the feeling of the event. And it was my best man ADS who worked so hard to help us put together a wedding that was both beautiful and down-to-earth.

It must have worked too, because ten years later, we’re still going strong. Except today, instead of eating a delicious and simple brunch with sparkling wine and cake, we’ll be eating a delicious and simple supper with one of our favorite wines and perhaps some ice cream. And instead of being surrounded by our family and friends, we’re surrounded by our two beautiful children.

Tonight we’ll drink a toast to another ten years. But I’d also like to toast all of those who were there when it all started, and to everyone who we have met along the way. It’s really an incredible journey, and I’m still convinced that marrying this woman was one of the best decisions of my life.

[I say “one of” because it never would have happened without a string of other good decisions before it… just in case you were wondering.]