Fire and Ice
My first work week of the year was a short one. I didn’t start to work until Wednesday and then I took off early on Friday to go to a protest. Between the kidnapping of the President of Venezuela and the killing of a protestor in Minneapolis, the year had gotten off to a dismal and dismaying start. There were nationwide protests planned for the weekend, but Beth had a prior engagement, so we decided to go to a Friday afternoon roadside protest in Silver Spring. I made my sign the night before; the side I meant to face the street had just the words “Fire Ice” in letters I hoped would be big enough to read from the road, with accompanying sketches of fire and ice. (I think if I use it again, I will make the letters thicker, so they are more legible from a distance.)
This recurring protest happens every week at 4 p.m. on 16th Street, a six-lane thoroughfare. The weather was not inviting, in the forties and drizzling when we arrived, but there was a moderate turnout, several dozen people. I’m not a regular at this one, so I’m not sure how that compares to an average week. People’s signs were about various issues, but anti-ICE ones were popular and two people in the median held signs that said, “No Blood for Oil” and “No War.” Someone on the other side of the street had an upside-down American flag. My favorite sign might have been the one that said, “Alexa… change the President.” If only it were that simple…
As usual at these types of protests, there was a lot of positive engagement from passing traffic, near constant honking, waving, and thumbs up from drivers. I most appreciated honks from a school bus driver and a contractor’s truck with a Spanish surname in the name of the company. There was also an elementary school age child (perhaps Latino—it was hard to tell at a distance) who leaned out a rolled down window and yelled “Thank you!” repeatedly across several lanes of traffic. Another driver yelled to us, echoing “No Blood for Oil” and then wished us “a blessed weekend.” This isn’t something I’d say myself, not being religious, but I appreciated the sentiment.
A Ceremony to Prove It
Friday night after a dinner of homemade pizza we watched Train Dreams. In the scene in which the protagonist proposes to his wife, she says they are already married, they just need “a ceremony to prove it.” That line struck me because the anniversary of the two times Beth and I had a ceremony to prove it was in two days. Each one was a different kind of proof. As of today, it’s now been thirty-four years since our commitment ceremony with friends and family in one living room and thirteen since our legal wedding in another living room, with just the two of us, the kids, and an officiant.
On Saturday afternoon I made the spice cake I made for the first time for the commitment ceremony, and I have made almost every year since then. While it was in the oven I read a few chapters of The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, which I’m reading because my book club is reading the modern re-reading Pym in February. Earlier that day Beth got a long-delayed haircut. In her first week of retirement, she also paid a visit to the dentist (also delayed) and attended the first meeting of her new Quigong class. She was happy to report she was not the youngest person there.
We had the cake Sunday afternoon, after a video call with North and before Noah left for his game club. It’s a comfortingly familiar cake by this point, dense, sweet, and moist. This year as most years I make a lemon frosting for it—the one year I made orange instead, North was quite put out.
We also exchanged cards and gifts. My card had a botanical illustration of a passionflower on the front. I circled the name of the flower, even though I know from writing about it—it’s a common ingredient in herbal sleep aides—that its name refers to the passion of Christ, not the other kind. Beth’s had pictures of the phases of the moon on it and said, “I love every phase of us” on the front.
One of the advantages of having an anniversary two and a half weeks after Christmas (other than relieving post-holiday letdown) is that we usually have leftover items on our Christmas lists and that makes gift-buying easy. This year we ended up with a reverse “Gift of the Magi” situation, in that without or planning it our gifts improved each other. Beth got me three kinds of nut butter—fancy nut butters being a diabetic-friendly treat—and I got her a nut butter mixer. It’s a lid with an attached crank that allows you to mix separated oil back into natural nut butters without splashing it out of the jar. We haven’t tried it out yet because while I opened one of the nut butters later in the afternoon, it was the pistachio-cocoa butter, which was creamy and didn’t need any mixing.
Happy anniversary, sweetheart. Even though I wish this phase of our lives did not involve the need for quite so many protests, I think we improve each other and this was a blessed weekend.