The Po Show

It was 20 Years Ago...ummm, Three Weeks Ago

I really shouldn't let this anniversary pass by without remark, though I guess I did. It was 3 weeks ago, but in relation to 20 years, 3 weeks isn't all that much.

20 years ago, three weeks ago, Ross and I became a couple. Now that label means a lot of different things to different people, and what makes a couple is as variable as the number of couples there are. I tell people that this anniversary is the anniversary of the first time we had sex, but that is mostly a quip.

Really what happened that night was that my eyes opened to the fact that I loved him, and that he was the one for me. It took getting stoned to bring down our inhibitions about the fact that we were friends, and had been friends for a long time, and our fears of what would happen if we took the leap to more-than-friendship.

20 years ago, but it seems like a couple of days ago that we were standing next to the ladder to the loft in my dorm room, high as kites, and started kissing. We were exhilarated, we were freaked, we were going to be late for a movie. One of my roommates walked in, realized that something was up, was embarassed for us all. We quickly made an exit and went to that movie.

It was a double feature, which provided a long time for us to keep freaking and wondering what the hell the other person was thinking. Between the movies, I went to the bathroom and, as is common in women's restrooms, had to wait a long time. Ross feared I had panicked and left.

The evening progressed, and it was clear that there was a lot of strong feeling between us. The waves crashed below us as we walked along the Capitola shoreline and we kissed. Several times other people paused nearby, then were chased away by our relentless kissing. It was like the world had opened up a new window. Things progressed further, though the end of the evening was pretty de-romanticized when my roommate and a friend (who were SUPPOSED to be spending the night at the friend's place!) came back to our room.

Thus September 28 became our anniversary. Every month for the first year we went out to dinner to celebrate, as silly teenagers in the first year of a love affair are wont to do.

20 years ago, we were 19 years old. I am overwhelmed with the incomprehensible nature of that statement. I can't believe we were that young, and I can't believe it was so long ago. I can't believe I've done anything for 20 whole years, but I have loved this man for that long.

And he remembered! When I picked him up at the train station, he was carrying a bouquet of flowers. No wonder it's lasted 20 years.

Ample Make This Bed

Ample make this bed
Make this bed with awe...

I can't remember the rest, but it's a lovely poem by Emily Dickenson, which I remember because it's read at the end of Sophie's Choice by the William Styron character.

But this is about beds, new and old. Ross and I have a new bed, a lovely plush pillowtop bed purchased during the last weekend (lots of Columbus Day sales! Thanks Columbus for making our bed cheaper!). We've been talking about getting a new bed for a long time, as the old one was 11 years old and pretty shot. It had been from Costco and was not of the greatest quality to begin with, and it's seen a lot of use (is innuendo being implied here? You be the judge!).

So I put the old bed up for offer on freecycle (ah, feeling so very civic virtuous, keeping down that old landfill). A woman named Sandra just came and picked it up. She was accompanied by her teenage daughter and an older man with a beat up old pickup truck that already had a sofa and a bookcase in it. Looking at the two women, it seemed likely that they were moving out of a shelter and thus needed the furniture. She was really grateful and I felt both humbled and very very glad that I had put the bed up on freecycle. The place we purchased our new bed from had wanted $30 apiece to haul away our old mattress and box spring to the dump, and I am so happy that instead it went to someone that really NEEDED it to sleep on!

I felt wistful as it was being loaded up onto the truck though. People spend a lot of time in bed, if they're lucky, and 11 years is a long time. It was the first bed we had when we moved out of our single apartment in Westwood and into our first one bedroom in L.A. Ross was in his first year of grad school at UCLA and I was working the first year in my job. We were trying to have a baby.

Matthew never was conceived in that bed (instead he was conceived when Ross' washed sperm was inserted into me via a catheter at the Kaiser in Panorama City, while Ross waited in the waiting room). Tessa was, though, I think. I took a lot of naps on that bed before we had kids. I have no idea how many time Ross and I had sex on that bed, but it was probably well over a thousand.

I snuggled my babies on that bed when they were days old. Tessa was still crawling into that bed with us every single night up to last Thursday. That bed traveled with us, from L.A. to Davis (where it went into Tessa's room, since Ross and I slept on the bed the owners of our house had left while they were away for the year, which I still find sort of weird) to Belmont Massachussetts to White Plains New York. Now it travels again, without us.

Yes, it was amply made, indeed.