A wedding anniversary is the celebration of love, trust, partnership, tolerance and tenacity. The order varies for any given year. - Paul Sweeney

H. likes to tell people we met when I was dancing in a bar.

He neglects to mention that he was playing guitar in a ceili band, and I was doing ceili dancing, in a neighborhood Irish bar, with about a gazillion old people and maybe three other people our age.

I remember him as a bit of a dork. My friend Janice had a crush on him and spent much time discussing with me how to get him to ask her out. I remember one splendid evening she got him to give her a ride home.

I happened to be dating a genuine, bona fide Irishman from Armagh at the time, with a charming accent, bad teeth, and the heart of a playboy. (Any genuine Irishman with an accent in an American bar will score. Every time. True fact.)
I remember being at a New Year’s Eve party and sitting on Paddy’s lap and Janice throwing herself at H. who, I later discovered, was seething inside with passion for me as he sat on the couch across the room. How was I to know? Shortly thereafter, Paddy and I broke up. (He said I wasn't "feminine enough" for him.)

H. asked me to a hockey game – I said no. Instead I had plans to party with friends the day of the Saint Patrick’s parade.

I remember he always wore this mint-green Glacier Park baseball cap that his hair stuck out from under, and a dorky bright green jacket that his sweater stuck out from under, and black sneakers.

Then he lent me his favorite book to read, Tom Robbins' Jitterbug Perfume. That very well may have been what did it, although I don’t really remember anymore.

Next thing I knew I was at Eat N Park with him at 3 in the morning, after a gig, guitars under my feet because (I know this now) you can’t let a guitar reach any extreme of temperature, either hot or cold, so the guitars came inside with us.
He drove a little beige Prizm and I remember standing outside his car that March evening, after late-night breakfast, after a Saint Patrick’s Day-week performance, being kissed by him. It was a nice kiss, gentle and sweet.

His birthday is in April – I gave him a beautifully illustrated copy of Rudyard Kipling’s Just So Stories - he lived in Africa for several years - by which he seemed underwhelmed. He gave me a tie-dyed long-sleeved t-shirt for my birthday several weeks later.

It was a fairly unremarkable courtship. He called when he said he would, we spent weekends together. He called me at work everyday to say hello, and his roommate was ok with me being at the apartment an awful lot.

I met his family. I remember skipping out of a tech rehearsal to go to dinner at his parents’ for some holiday – I wore a little red plaid kilt and a long-sleeved red sweater; I think I took his mom an Easter lily. I went to his nephews’ christening, having no idea what it was all about, and gave them children’s Bibles. I was not and really never have been at ease around his family. I read too much, talk too much, work at weird jobs, and drink rum instead of froufy girly drinks.

He came home with me to New Jersey for a family wedding – I remember he wore these awful loafer-y plasticky dress shoes with his suit but looked very handsome otherwise. We went for a walk during the reception and he started asking me questions about what I would like my wedding to be like. Clueless, I said I had not given it much thought and left it at that.

My mother thought he was charming and handsome and manipulative and too old for me.

H. proposed on a Tuesday night in August, during a break of the ceili session at the bar. He wrote me a song, most of which I no longer remember but I am sure he does, and hid the ring in the neck compartment of his guitar case. I thought he was kidding at first.
He says he got waylaid by some old family priest who wanted to talk about H.’s grandmother, and was sweating bullets, with the ring in his pocket, afraid that the break would be over before he got to me.

I called my on-again, off-again longtime college boyfriend, J., and told him I was not moving to New Haven to live with him, as we had planned, but instead was marrying someone I’d met six months previously. I must say, he took it rather well.
The next day I wore my ring to work at the theatre – it took practically all day for anyone to notice that the scenic artist was wearing a healthy-sized sparkly diamond solitaire on her finger. Apparently it went rather well with my painted-up jeans, flannel shirt, and hiking boots.

When we called H.’s mom to tell her we were engaged, she asked, “To each other?”

We planned the wedding in less than six months. We were the last of the three couples in his immediate family to get engaged, and the first to get married.

I picked my dress out by myself. When I showed Mrs. P. a picture of it, she said, “It’s plain. But so are you.” She truly did mean well, I know now. She just has very conventional ideas about things. Especially things like weddings. Especially the wedding of her oldest son, whom, she confided to me at one point, she had hoped would become a priest.

My own mother got her nose in a snit about God knows what at this point and didn’t speak to me for months before the wedding. She wore black – on purpose – to the rehearsal dinner. And she and Mrs. P wore the same dress to the wedding, my mom in turquoise and Mrs. P in cream, that they’d bought in stores three hundred miles apart.

In most of the pictures, especially the one where my older brother is walking me down the aisle, I look like a deer caught in the headlights, but the best man - H.'s college roommate - poured enough champagne into me eventually and I relaxed a bit.
So did everyone else - my father-in-law insisted on Guinness at the reception.

At some point H. got on stage with his band and sang, of all things, the Georgia Satellites' "Keep Your Hands to Yourself." (To this day I do not know WHAT he was thinking.)

We went to Italy on our honeymoon. We were in Venice for Carnivale and traipsed all over Rome and stayed in cozy little albergos and watched a woman eat an entire whole baby octopus, with its tentacles pinned to the top of its head, in a terrific restaurant in Florence. We drank like fiends. I never got a migraine because all the wine is so fresh - no sulfites.

We returned home to our one-bedroom apartment that was so small - and I was so neurotic - that I couldn't go to the bathroom if he was in the apartment for at least the first six months of our marriage.

It's eleven years today. Three beautiful kids, two houses, two graduate degrees, and a combined fifty pounds later.

Crazy as he makes me, he has put up with things many men would not - and arguably should not - have to. He’s seen me at my worst and still talks to me. He's still handsome and charming, when he wants to be. He's one of the very few people I've met who is as stubborn as I am. I don’t know how much more I could want. I do love him.

Happy anniversary, H.