First Anniversary!

Okay.  Nobody is more surprised about this than Me!

Today is our one-year wedding anniversary.  It was the first wedding for both of us, and was a particularly big event for me, since I put love and marriage together about the same way I do sex and babies: I know there's a connection, but I'm not interested in it at all.

But I married Sue anyway and today am way glad I did.  We had a sweet little ceremony at this empty super-luxurious condo where we were living (mostly because the economic downturn made it possible for guys like me to live there); Sue's mother flew in from El Salvador, we had pupusas catered in from a great Salvadoran joint in Lantana, and all our friends came to wish us well and make it a beautiful day.

Naturally, everything that could go wrong did go wrong, with a couple of real neat extras on top.  Sue's car was shot out from under her about two months earlier and I bought a junker for her to get around in.  That car died on the Wednesday before the wedding and so we rushed over to some dealership that was wicked glad to see us because of the . . . economic downturn, and bought her a good car.  Since I already owned a car from after my motorcycle accident (four wheels only now for Papi!), I was suddenly the proud owner of loans on two (2!) cars.  But it wasn't over: the next day Enrique's car died and he and Nuria had to walk home from the Tri-Rail station on Gateway.  Then I showed up for the ceremony without the ring (Oh, that!  Really?  Like you want me to put it on or something?) and everybody had to wait while Miguel and I ran around looking for it.

The most important thing, and the thing I had been most concerned about, was that pretty much our entire community of friends and colleagues showed up to share the moment and to wish us well.  The community or public part of the whole wedding thing was the hardest for me.  I think its the heart of the disassociation of love or sex and marriage with which I began above: I tend to be shy about publicizing my personal life.  And I thought there was plenty of good reason to be shy about this union, since it was with a former student who is so much younger than me.  But it turned out that everybody was way happy that we were doing this.  Who knew?  Last night Sue and I went to a faculty party where half a dozen people who knew me when I was in my previous relationship came up and said how happy and how "relaxed" I look since hooking up with Sue.  That's good enough for me.

So it was a lovely day and I'm happy to remember it a year later.  What I remember most is how fucking beautiful Sue looked, how she was able to take over the situation and to be the star with so little effort, and how happy she was.  Its a great thing to be able to make somebody that happy, and frankly, I never thought I could.  I love her, love being married and wearing the ring, I love my family and I love all my friends and colleagues who have been able to bless our marriage.

I got up early to write this before the day started.  Sue and Enrique are stirring and I think we're going to run down to that Salvadoran joint in Lantana to re-up on pupusas.

Small World. Even Smaller School District

A while back an old friend came into Gold's Gym and told me that, almost a year to the day from my motorcycle accident, my ex had been in a terrible bike crash.  My friend is a teacher in the Palm Beach County School District, as is, or was, Sue, and a dozen or so other people I know well.  She did a couple of body building shows with me and knew me and my ex when we were working out at the now defunct Gold's in Palm Beach Gardens.

I don't have the details because my ex and I aren't "speaking."  I went onto a chat forum of hers on Salon.com, and it appears she was run off the road by some asshole driver.  This sucks.  She took a hard blow to the head and spent a week or so in the hospital.  I don't know if she was wearing a helmet, but I suspect she was because my ex is a very competent and careful cyclist.  Honestly, my heart goes out to her and I hope she's all right; and, honestly, I have no idea how she's doing.

I also don't know how my old friend found out about my ex's accident.  But Palm Beach County isn't that big and the school district is a small and enclosed planetary system.  My ex and I also worked out together at Gold's Gym for five years and there are people from her old restaurant jobs who still work out there. Other people from the District who know or know about my ex include my good friend and former workout partner, Chula, who is an Occupational Therapist for the District, and Heidi Schisser, who is an audiologist for the District and who works in Wellington.  Heidi's daughter, Debbie Schisser is best friends with somebody named, I think, Robin, who used to work with my ex at a local restaurant and who has some sort of grudge against her.  Debbie has been tracking my ex online for a while.  Sue shared a room with Debbie in Abacoa for a while, which made Heidi Sue's landlord.  Once in the middle of a dispute about rent, Heidi looked past Sue at me and said:

"And you!  I know all about you."

"Uh-huh," I said.  I mean, what the fuck to you say to that?  But Heidi wasn't done:

"I mean Annie!  I know all about her."

"Annie and I broke up more than three years ago.  What are you talking about?"

"Just that I know all about her."

Whatever.  I'm not sure what there is to "know" about my ex.  Some of the time signatures on her posts to Salon suggest she is posting from the school on a District computer.  Maybe that's what Heidi was talking about.  I dunno.  But one odd repercussion of this recent accident is that my ex has decided that I'm blog-stalking her.  She started talking about this last year on the day -- and I mean the very day! -- that Sue put our first wedding pictures on FLICKR.  My ex sent me an email saying I was stalking her and then posted something on her forum all in caps and all full of "FUCK YOU"s.  You get the idea.  My ex has been talking about me on Salon pretty steadily for the last four years, pretty much reconstructing our past in order to account for a bad breakup. I guess everybody does that.  I wish she were not publishing my name, but there isn't much I can do about it except wait.  But we broke up, and had an ugly breakup, because she has a pretty serious alcohol-abuse problem, and I'm guessing that her drinking is behind some of the seething rage and spleen to which she has exposed me in recent days.

Mostly, I wish her a speedy and thorough recovery.  We both survived life-threatening road wrecks in the space of the same year.  Is that destiny or what?

Birthday Officially Over. Sort of. . .

Okay.  This is a picture of Sue and me out at some Argentine joint for dinner on my birthday Friday night.  Enrique took the picture, so he's not in it.  But the three of us went out and had a really wonderful time.

I'm not used to having fun on my birthdays. (Well, I've had so many!)  But running around town with Sue and Enrique, even with my Shingles looming and getting ready for a rerun, was a lot of fun.  Sue spent an hour working on her hair to get it that straight.  I love it however she does it, but was touched that she put all that work into it for me.  We sat in this place jamming grilled meat into our faces for a couple of hours and then came home and watched a movie.  Mostly, looking at this picture, I'm struck by how beautiful Sue is and can't stop wondering what the fuck happened so that I got hooked up with somebody like her.



This year Fridays have been our family night, since Enrique is off then too.  For a long time it was tequila night, but I'm back into training and not drinking any more.  We spent a lot of time this night thanking God that we've had such a good year, when so many people have had rotten ones.  The night I got out of the hospital last March Sue was in class till 10 p.m. and Enrique had to come bust me out.  He took me to a bar near our apartment in Boynton Beach and we started powering down margaritas.  After a while I noticed people were staring at me and asked the waiter for scissors to cut the hospital bands off my wrists.  Sue got there with an "A" paper and we drank some more.  Its great having a family.

Sue and I went out on Saturday with Louis Habicher, whom I know some of you know.  Louis is 14 now, and I've known him since he was 3.  He just got into Suncoast High, which means he will most definately get a shot at college.  I'm real proud of him and real happy for his success.

MY ASS HURTS!

Okay, I've been bad, I know.  Sue has been after me, in private and in public, to update this fucker.  And so I thought I would make this update:

My ass hurts!

It hurts because I'm finally back in the gym and on Wednesday night hit my legs hard, after a slow build-back.  And today, my ass hurts and I'm waddling around like a duck and my students are telling me I'm in good shape for my age.

It has been a strange 22 weeks.  That's the time since my last post.  I have a pretty serious spine problem, blowback from my motorcycle wreck.  Everybody has an opinion about it: some guys want to do a surgery, others want to do cortisone shots, and then there's acupuncture and chiropractic.  So far, I'm going with the chiropractor, mostly because its the least invasive and it seems to work.  

The really weird thing is that sometime in September I came down with shingles (SHINGLES!  FUCKING SHINGLES!), and that kept me pretty much crippled up for about four months.  My friend and colleague, Dan White, told me the names of all the famous philosophers who died of Shingles.   It still hurts some, and I have some fear about it coming back.  But the only thing I know how to do right now is to stay on the diet and keep going to the gym.  I was out about four months, but I'm happy about how fast I came back.  On Monday I got dumbell inclines with 80-pounds.  That pretty much means I'm back.  My weight is back up to 193 or -4, after falling to 180 in January.

We had a strange year for health issues.  My beloved brother, Brian, came down to help me after my accident, then went back home to get diagnosed with a brain tumor.  Sue and I ran up to North Carolina in August for what turned out to be a very clean and easy operation.  They just yanked that fucker outta him.  No cancer, no nothin'.  I saw members of my fucked-up, dysfunctional family I haven't seen in nearly 25 years; I met my 23-year-old nephews.  Also, on the last day of Sue's mom's visit for the wedding last April, the family got a panicked call from her brother, Charlie.  He was way sick and Nuria got back just in time to get him to the hospital.  He was diagnosed with lupus. This is a heartbreak for us all:  Enrique can't go back to El Salvador, and Sue has been blocked from travel by immigration bullshit.  This is a hard thing for the whole family.

The week after next is the one-year anniversary of our wedding.  This is very strange.  I'm married.  I wear a ring.  I have a wife!  Shit!  I can't say how happy this all has made me, or how good for me living with Sue has been.  I know everybody thinks that Sue was the kid who came to college and got crushed out on her English teacher and finally married him.  But it may be that all the things she does for me are less apparent to people.  (Except those who see me every day and who keep telling me how happy I look.  Finally.)  She and Enrique just came in with vids from blockbuster and scented candles and flowers for the apartment.  How do you beat that!  I'll be 59 next Friday, and if I can just hold off a return of the shingles and keep my herniated neck under control, I'll be fine.