Ten Years Today

Lee was showing me around the cafe. This is where we keep the orders; this is how to brew the coffee; here’s the cash register; down this hall is the kitchen; and that’s Ed. He was slumped over a crossword on a chair by the back door, lit cigarette in hand, wearing a green baseball cap and a greasy apron. “Hey.” “Hey.” I didn’t give him a second thought.

We were slammed one day at lunch, the order chits three or four rows deep on the cork board in the kitchen. When a woman placed a take-out order for a club sandwich I told her it would take a while. She said she’d come back for it. Fifteen or twenty minutes later, she was back and I walked the length of the hall to see if her order was almost ready. “Hey, the lady’s here for that take out club.” “You can tell her she can come back here and suck my fucking balls.” I guessed it wasn’t quite ready. “It’s going to be another few minutes,” I smiled. Just then he walked the order out himself, wrapped up and ready to go.

It started when I noticed he was reading The Thought Gang by Tibor Fischer, I guess. And he would sit in the hall outside the kitchen drawing up posters by hand for an open mike night that he would photocopy and tape to the window, and pin up in coffee joints all through the city. He’d host these nights and he’d read poetry and stories and sing songs with a guitar. People would come out and for a while those nights were really happening. Once I even got up and read something about a woman from Thunder Bay.

When we went out for drinks as a group, it was always me and him talking and lingering and maybe even flirting. I finally got up the nerve to ask him out to a movie and then realized I’d forgotten my wallet when we got there. There were many drunken nights and by day we’d walk a thousand city blocks or more, talking and laughing and talking some more. We became boyfriend and girlfriend, traversing the great east-west divide.

Dozens of poetry nights and a couple waitressing jobs later, we were talking over late-night Chinese. “Where do you see this going?” he asked. “What do you mean?” “Like, are we just hanging out for kicks? Or can you see us staying together?” I kept eating. “Oh sure, I can see us staying together.” “Like, could you see us getting married? Down the road?” “Down the road? Sure, maybe. I could see that.”

And then a couple weeks later, he brought it up again. “So when we talked about getting married sometime down the road?” “Yeah.” “Do you, uh, do you want to go have dinner with my parents and tell them?” ” … Tell them …? What?” “Tell them that we’re getting married.” “Oh! Do you mean, like, you want to get married married? Like telling people that we’re going to get married?!” I was 21 years old.

We waited two years and then we threw one hell of a party (thank you, Mom and Dad). We spent our honeymoon walking and eating and drinking our way across Manhattan. Thirty dollar glasses of Veuve Clicquot at The Alogonquin Hotel and pasta on Mulberry Street and loads of wonderful meat at Brasserie Les Halles and Ed still stopped for a hot dog at every corner.

We lived off OSAP and near-minimum wages and canned soup and pizza that first year.

Five apartments, at least five jobs, one fixer-upper of a house, three babies and a billion fights later and we’re still here.

Ten years later and we’re still here. Something tells me we’re just getting started.

Happy anniversary, Ed. Thanks for letting me share the stage in your open mike night.