There aren’t many folks who’ll welcome a 13 into the house.
Our city’s planners didn’t. Why do you think we have Mountain View Avenue?
Garth Brooks didn’t. The man once skipped directly from track 12 to track 14 on a CD, filling the 13th with a few seconds of applause.
Baker’s dozens, skipped hotel floors … the list goes on and on. Call it superstition. Call it tradition. Call it seriously unwanted.
At least, until it reaches my doorstep.
At Chez Rochat, the big 1-3 is more than welcome. Come on in. Make yourself comfortable. Come back anytime.
After all, how many people are going to turn down a 13th wedding anniversary?
That’s right. On July 25, 1998, a skinny young man with hair that would not stay down said “I do” to a kind and beautiful lady and heard her answer back. Well, mostly heard her, over his own hyperventilating.
These days, the hair has shed, the waist has spread, and the breath has reached a more regular rhythm. But the love has remained the same. And with every passing year, I’m reminded just how fortunate we are.
Well, maybe fortunate’s not exactly the word. Every marriage takes a lot of work, ours no less than any. But every time I see a friend blink and congratulate us as though we’d just hit the diamond anniversary, I can’t help feeling there’s been a little bit of luck, too.
I’ve been lucky to find a woman who would stay calm during her husband’s epileptic seizure. Who smiles at his rampant geekery and tolerates his reporter’s schedule. Who hasn’t yet executed him for leaving his tennis shoes in the middle of the living room.
Given her own soapbox, I guess Heather might say the same about a husband who held back her hair when Crohn’s disease turned her stomach upside down, or who greeted her Sailor Moon fixation with an amused grin, or who nodded and said “Yes, dear,” when she adopted a small army of birds to join our parakeet Sharpie. (Yes, the Rochats now have their own air force.)
But luckiest of all has been that we both believe in this. That we understand a marriage is more than just “a wedding and the other stuff.” That there are fun days and hard days, but no days that aren’t worth trying just one more time.
In a society of seven-year itches, maybe that’s the best fortune of all.
On our wedding day, my grandma gave the two of us a bit of advice. “If you can make it past the first 30 years,” she said, smiling, “the rest is easy.”
There’s a long time left to 30. But standing here at 13, it doesn’t look so imposing as it did. Not here at this point, where, as Heather puts it, our marriage feels both brand new and as though it had always been.
Thirteen.
Wow.
Call it what you will. But it’s definitely not a wrong number.