About a month into our romance, and nearly four years ago, Michelle and I were having lunch at Il Dolce Cafe. It's gone now, but used to be one of our favorites on Montana Ave. On a street cluttered with glossy shops and eateries, this hole in the wall was anything but pretentious or polished. The food was good, service was poor but friendly, and the roof, which appeared to be second hand scrap from a Quonset hut, was ever threatening to collapse at the faintest touch of a sea breeze. We didn't care. We were busy falling in love. It was cozy and private, and the clientele that it attracted always made people-watching a great side attraction.
So we were sitting there, probably waiting forever for our food, when an older gentleman at the table next to us rose to leave. He stopped at our table, smiled, and gave us a white paper placemat. On it was a pencil sketch of Michelle and me. It was a remarkable sketch for the short amount of time he had to do it - something we would have paid for if he had asked. I don't recall exactly what he said, but it was something funny and kind, and then, without even leaving us his name, he and his wife wished us well and left. We've never seen this man again, but his placemat sketch is now framed and in a corner of our living room.
Cut to three and half years later and the time finally came for us to send out Save the Dates for our wedding. We resisted them for as long as we could. There is a finality in sending those darn little things out. Until they get dropped in the mail, your wedding is just a blip on the radar and can easily dissapear. Once they're sent, however, the wedding becomes something more tangible. The blip takes shape, becomes not just a blip but a fishing trawler, or a cruise ship, or depending on your wedding and how you're planning it, a Russian nuclear submarine bee-lining for NYC.
It's not that Michelle and I were having second thoughts about getting married, but more that every time planning became annoying one of us would always say, "we could just elope and take a trip around the world instead." This would inevitably change the subject from something inane, like what color combination we should use on our wedding website, to something dreamy and exotic. While the scenario was unlikely, it still existed in some realm as a possibility. Then again, I suppose it always will. Right up until the day we find ourselves in Lake Tahoe getting married with a gaggle of friends and family there to celebrate we can always cancel and book an eighteen hour flight to Singapore. But as more people get involved, and more preperations are made, and more calendars get marked off for the first weekend in August, a trip around the world in lieu of it all becomes less realistic.
My hunch is that this is why, after realizing the Save the Dates MUST GO OUT, it still took us two weeks to come up with anything. We scoured the deepest recesses of our various hard drives looking for a picture that captured 'us'. With nights on the town, vacations, family gatherings and what not, we've built up a fairly large collection of couple photos. For any other purpose, at any other time, we both usually appreciate them, but this time around we couldn't find a suitable one in the lot. Our conversations sounded a lot like this:
Michelle: How 'bout this one?
I'd look. Scowl, and --
Andrew: No. My elbow looks chubby. But I kinda like this one...
Michelle would look. Cringe, and --
Michelle: Meh. It's a winter shot. We're having a summer wedding. And we're wearing sunglasses. What about that one where we're in the Thing on our way to Monterey?
Andrew: We look like hippies. And I'm pale. Like a vampire hippy.
Michelle: Yeah, you're right.
Andrew: I am?
A quick kiss to my cheek, and --
Michelle: I like vampire hippies. My hair's too greasy anyway. I think that was day four.
Andrew: We could meld those two photos of us as kids.
Michelle: I have a bowl cut, but I guess it could work.
Andrew: Eh, never mind. I don't like it.
Michelle: Maybe we should just elope and take a long trip around the world instead.
Andrew: Can we start in the South of France?
And we'd go around and around like this, dissecting every last pixel of every possible picture for hours until a trip around the world came up. We'd digress, drink more wine, get tired, go to bed and pick up three days later where we'd left off, which was no place in particular in this circular conversation. Finally though, an idea popped that we got excited about.
I'm not sure why we didn't think of it earlier. My guess, again, would be the whole elope/world travel thing, but for one reason or another it never occurred to us that we could use the pencil sketch. Then one day it just did. I don't even know who thought of it. But it came up in one of our dizzying conversations and we both gravitated towards the idea. Take a photo of the sketch, photoshop it a bit, overlay the info and voila - the date will be ready to be saved. Easy peasy.
Twenty photos, thirty-seven contrast variations in Sepia, fifteen different fonts and countless structural variations to state some very basic information - about five days of on and off tinkering - and the Save the Date was finally ready to be emailed to our friends at Minted.com. No, this is not a promotional plug, I'm just giving credit where credit is due. They designed the overlay and they did a great job putting the final polishes on the picture we sent them. Less than a week after we provided them the materials we had slaved over they emailed us prototype. We loved it, figured out how many we'd need, and put in the order.
We waited with fingers crossed. From what we saw online, the card looked as we wanted it to. But the real thing? Who knew. Maybe it would look awful in print. And then this arrived...
... and a strange thing happened. We forgot we ever thought about eloping, about foregoing this wild, crazy, sometimes disastrously frustrating and brain-sizzlingly annoying, but often exciting, goofy and glorious adventure that is wedding planning. It's easy to get lost along the way, but every so often you get a glimpse of what it's all about and it keeps you going. This was our past - the romantic seedlings at the onset that sprouted into the relationship we are thankful for today. This was our future - the upcoming celebration to honor our sprout, and to commit to watering it daily forever*. And this was us, in the moment, taking all that in and not wanting it to be any other way (i.e. elope and take a trip around the world). This was one of those glimpses.
*Yes, the metaphor is about as quality as cheese whiz, but sometimes when you're feeling nostalgic, or hung-over, or insanely hungry, or just plain lazy (like me, at the end of writing this), cheese whiz really hits the spot.
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