For All Time...

Rick and I are celebrating our 14th wedding anniversary today. Yes, I know it's the 13th. In fact, we actually got married on a Friday the 13th! It's turned out to be our lucky day.

We must have looked like total lunatics to our families back them. We had just moved to Seattle from Nevada, dragging along three young kids and starting over in so many ways. We were living in a tiny two-bedroom apartment, with all three kids sharing a room. They had bunk beds and a third mattress that slid under the bottom one for storage in the daytime. We were looking for a bigger place, but didn't have jobs yet. We had only just decided to buy a pizza shop and create our own jobs. Back in Nevada, Rick had been sort of an executive social worker, and I was a dental assistant. We both knew we had to do something different, so pizza seemed like a good idea! We needed to get some money coming in first, and then think about a bigger place to live.

With all that going on, planning a wedding seemed like more than we could handle. So we put together a super small ceremony and didn't include anyone but the kids. We didn't want a church wedding, but also didn't want a courthouse deal, so we settled on the Aquarian Foundation, which is in a big old house on Capitol Hill in Seattle. Kind of a weird and creepy place, with portraits of the "elders" lining the walls, a huge pile of crystals forming the "altar", and a woman named Doris, who performed the ceremony. They're seriously into reincarnation there, and I'll never forget Doris looking us in the eye and saying, "When you're married in our church, you're married for all time...". We looked at each other and said, OK by me, and that was that.

We dropped the kids off at Rick's sister's, and headed for the ferry to Victoria, BC. We only had a weekend for our honeymoon, but it was so pretty and romantic there. We stayed at the famous Empress Hotel and strolled the streets, shopping and eating and alternating between hot lattes and cold beers. The pizza shop deal was in the works, so it was much on our minds. We didn't have a name for it yet, and needed to settle on something so we could get the business license and signs and menus all put together. We tried on every name that floated through our minds... Fast Car Pizza... Red Shoe Pizza... Blue Sky Pizza... Crazy People Pizza... and finally, over beers in a nice little pub, one of us tossed out Honeymoon Pizza. We instantly recognized it as the little piece that would tie our whole new-life-puzzle together. Honeymoon Pizza was a big success, but that's another story for another time. An eight year long story that shaped our entire stay in Seattle, and somehow led us to Taos.

And here we are, fourteen years later, still happy with the idea of being together for all time... We won't be eating pizza tonight. We'll go someplace special like Antonio's or Joseph's Table, pleased with what we've done so far, and looking forward to what comes next.

Cheers!