Pseudo-anniversary
It’s our pseudo-anniversary today, an anniversary that I often forget until our actual one. You see, Mr. Bookworm and I accidentally got married twenty years ago today.
How did that happen?
Maybe I should say that we didn’t exactly accidentally get married that day, just unknowingly got married.
No this does not involve Las Vegas and copious amounts of alcohol. :D
We planned our wedding from afar, while I was living in Boston and finishing my first year of med school and Mr. Bookworm was finishing his last year of grad school at UC Davis. Our wedding was at the La Venta Inn, a gorgeous home-like venue in Palos Verdes with views overlooking the ocean.
We wanted an outdoor ceremony. And we didn’t care too much about all the little details.
Except for one. Though Mr. Bookworm and I were both raised Catholic, neither of us really want to get married in the Catholic church.
Do you know Filipino families and culture? My Lola (maternal grandma) put her foot down. She said she wouldn’t attend our wedding unless it was in the Catholic church.
I was far away. Just trying to get through my onslaught of classes. And spending a cold winter in Boston. My Lola and my mom stopped talking to me. (When you ask my mom, she has no memory of this, but this is how I remember it….maybe I was too busy to understand otherwise.)
My parents met in Boston when they were in residency at the same hospital associated with my medical school. Because I was born and raised in California, I had NO idea how cold I would get in Boston. I wasn’t prepared. But what I did have? Proximity to med school—I lived in the dorms that first year and could walk to all of my classes.
I remember gazing out of my window at the courtyard at the center of Posner Hall, watching snow flakes gather on the bare tree limbs there. I remember wearing my mom’s old rabbit fur-lined leather gloves—the same gloves that she wore when she lived in Boston—and thinking that she was keeping me warm even as she wouldn’t talk to me.
In the end, Mr. Bookworm and I decided that we didn’t care who officiated at our wedding. We just wanted to get married.
You might say that my Lola won. Or my mom. But, really, I did. I was happy not to fight with my Lola on what ended up being the year before she died.
So Lola contacted the Catholic church near La Venta Inn. And Father M had us rehearse our vows in the little chapel of that church several days before our wedding. My Lola and Nana, Mr. Bookworm’s paternal grandma, served as our sponsors/witnesses. And on our wedding day, we repeated those vows on the lawn of La Venta Inn with the marine layer and ocean view greeting us along with our loved ones.
Fast forward to us never receiving our marriage certificate. Mr. Bookworm called again and again. First the officials in Los Angeles, then Sacramento in case it went through there. It was several years before he thought to give them today’s date instead.
Because, you see, Father M marked our rehearsal in the chapel as our official wedding day as a way of getting around the diocese’s rules of having the ceremony in a church, not the great outdoors.
Lola, you won. I admit it. And I miss you every day.
As for us? We still celebrate on what we consider our anniversary.
I love you, Mr. Bookworm, more than twenty years and counting.
