Or Maybe There’s No Obligations Now

And when it was all over, we had our life back.

It’s not that we’d necessarily abandoned the things we like to do while we were in the fog of wedding planning. We still went to the farmers market every Saturday. We dropped by 18 Reasons to eat Andante cheese, and found time to eat at much anticipated Nopalito twice. But it felt different. It was like being in school again, when your weekend didn’t really feel like free time because there was still homework to be done.

There was always something else we could be doing, should be doing, in those weeks leading up to the wedding, and so many of the things we did for fun were combined with wedding-related errands. Nopalito was close to The Other Shop, where we’d picked up some wedding decor. We justified going to 18 Reasons because we could also order a case of wine at BiRite.

But this first month post-wedding, our time felt ours again. There was so much we wanted to do that we packed our weeks full. (We were so enthusiastic, in fact, that we ended up with tickets for two different events on the same night.)

We went back to many of our favorite things: going to Blue Bottle’s first day in the Ferry Building to drink macchiatos and lust after their custom-made Heath Ceramics espresso cups. We checked out events like Pop-Up Magazine, and tried new sandwich shops that use local ingredients.

I even made it to a show, my first in at least a year, seeing Blitzen Trapper and Fleet Foxes at the Fillmore. Sitting in the Fillmore’s balcony, drinking beer with Mr. WholeHog as we waited for the show to start reminded me so much of the early days of our relationship. Our first outing together in SF was to see the Shins at the Great American Music Hall and over the years, we’ve seen so many bands together.

Mr.WholeHog has undoubtedly influenced my taste in music, coffee and even sandwiches, but he claims that I gave him a new appreciation for ice cream. And maybe I did, since he was the one to suggest that we go to Humphrey Slocombe one unseasonably warm Saturday.

Let it be known that had we lived in SF, I would never have let two months go by before trying a much-lauded ice cream shop (especially one that makes a salted licorice flavor). I still love my BiRite Creamery, of course, but anywhere that offers “Your Tin Roof Rusted” for $6, and has a sundae called “Hot Mess” is a place I want to frequent. Who doesn’t want a little personality with their ice cream, especially when their ice cream is so good?

Last Minute

On the day before our wedding, Mr. WholeHog got an unexpected text from his friend Adam: “You’re doing great,” it said.

At that point, it didn’t feel like we were doing anything great. We’d just run into traffic picking up music equipment and had likely missed our chance to have a rehearsal. We’d spent the week finalizing beer and wine, finding a shirt and tie for Mr. WholeHog, and filling our living room with tissue paper pom-poms as we attempted to sort out our many decor ideas.

Now that we actually pulled off our wedding(s), I feel OK admitting how much we left to the last minute. But while we were in the planning stages, our to-do list was overwhelming. I felt shamed when someone would breezily say, “Well I imagine by now you’ve got everything taken care of!” I’d think of five or ten things that we hadn’t yet taken care of, things that we hadn’t even made a decision about yet.

At times, it was easier to lie. A good friend is getting married in the fall so I’d use her story as my own.”When are you getting married?” a woman at a make-up counter asked me, a few weeks before my wedding date. “In the fall”, I said casually. “Well you’re ahead of schedule!” she said. It made me feel temporarily less panicked.

In hindsight, though, Adam’s text was true: we were doing great. We just didn’t know then that so many of the details that we put off the longest would be the most memorable.

One of the last things we did was our ceremony music. The night before our wedding, Mr. WholeHog edited down 5 or 6 songs we each loved so we each had an individual mix of music to lead us down the aisle.

Going for music we loved (Beatles, Fleetwood, and Beasties for me) rather than the expected classical selections set the tone for our wedding right off the bat. As I was waiting for my turn down the aisle, I heard Mr. WholeHog’s music start and the whole crowd cheered and clapped. It was clear that our guests were ready for a party.

Beer was another last minute choice: After looking unsuccessfully for a keg of beer from Moonlight or Speakeasy breweries, Mr. WholeHog wandered into a liquor store a few blocks away from our house. It was the day before our wedding, and there, amid all the Budweiser and Pabst, was a small keg of Bear Republic’s Racer 5 IPA. We thought our guests were mostly wine drinkers, but we ended up with over a case of wine that hadn’t been opened. The keg, however, was tapped.

I thought I was ahead of the game with my wedding attire. I found my dress in December, five months before the wedding, and I’d ordered a veil from Etsy two months in advance.

Photo by Jacob Bauch

But the veil didn’t arrive until two days before our wedding. Everything I’d read about birdcage veils said that I’d need to spend some time with it to get it right. The instructions from Etsy said I might have to iron it. Instead, I simply stuck it on my head 10 minutes before our ceremony and my sister pinned it into place. I got loads of compliments on that last minute detail, and it had the added benefit of making me feel like a bride.

Of course leaving details to the last minute is different than leaving essentials to the last minute. Maybe we felt OK putting certain things off because we knew that the location was full of personality on its own, and that our caterer had food and service covered.

Still, knowing what we know now, there’s so much we would have done differently. But part of what I’d change if I could is the fear that we were doing it wrong because everything wasn’t planned out in advance. I’ve come to realize that a lot of weddings — maybe most weddings — aren’t perfectly set up beforehand. A friend told me that she and her husband wrote their vows the night before their wedding. I met someone who decided the day of her wedding that her dress wasn’t right and went out and bought a new dress that day.

Perhaps the real freaks aren’t those of us who have last minute decisions, but those who have “dreamed of this day since I was 6 years old” sorts, those who haven’t left anything up to chance.

Think I’m Gonna Change Up My Style Just To Fit In?

The second time we were married, we were across the Golden Gate Bridge, in the green of the Marin Headlands, with our friends and family.

Our City Hall wedding was so satisfying that I’d wondered, briefly, if maybe that’s all we really needed. Maybe those months we spent choosing a location, designing invitations and deciding what wines to serve weren’t necessary after all.

Photo by Jacob Bauch

But while City Hall was refreshingly simple, it wasn’t personal. It wasn’t really about us. Our wedding in the Marin Headlands was truly ours. We chose the music, wrote our ceremony, and made decorations.

We didn’t have wedding colors or any particular theme. We aren’t religious people, so we didn’t have any traditional hoops to jump through. We tried to simply include what felt meaningful and fun to us. That meant that we had a reading from the Massachusetts Supreme Court decision that allowed gay and lesbian couples to marry, and also a reading from Suzanne Somers little known book of poetry, Touch Me.

It meant that we included our families in our ceremony — our dads MC’d and our moms each did a reading — and passed on the traditional father-daughter or mother-son dances.

Photo by Jacob Bauch

Our caterer shared our love of locally grown food and served a gorgeous spring meal (fava beans! asparagus! artichokes! lamb that even lamb-haters loved!), all sourced from Marin farms and ranches. Our guests are still talking about the food, and many guests told us later that they tried to recreate some of the food at home.

Instead of a tiered wedding cake, we had a selection of cakes from Miette for dessert. (I love that I can go eat our wedding cake any time I’m down at the Ferry Building.) Two of my aunts who were hungry to be involved in the wedding contributed family favorite desserts — Janet’s famous chocolate chip cookies and Mary Jo made her chocolate-peanut butter balls.

Anyone who knows Mr. WholeHog knows how much he loves coffee, so we had Blue Bottle Coffee come in and serve French press with dessert.

Friends who married 10 years ago said our wedding made them wonder, “What would our wedding have been like if we’d waited until we had personalities?” And, ultimately, that was our goal — not to worry about meeting someone else’s expectation of what a wedding is, but to have a party that felt like us, that reflected our values, and to share it with our favorite people.

You Can Have It All

Although it’s overused, I can’t help but turn to that lovely, succinct phrase that marks such a turning point in Jane Eyre:

Reader, I married him.

Actually, I married him twice: once on a bright Thursday morning at San Francisco’s majestic City Hall, and again on Saturday afternoon in the spring-green hills of the Marin Headlands.

Having two weddings was ideal for us. We didn’t have to choose between getting married in the City we love and having a wedding in a beautiful natural setting — we had both. We had both a wedding that took months to plan and a wedding that merely required an appointment made just two weeks prior. We had both a ceremony we wrote and one we simply showed up for.

It also helped me reconcile something that had bothered me in the lead-up to getting married: that the decision to get married and the commitment that marriage requires is intensely personal, while a wedding — the act of getting married — feels so public,  so loaded with expectations and trussed with tradition.

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It felt real to get married at City Hall. It wasn’t an event, it wasn’t trying to live up to some fantasy. It was out of our hands and there was something very relaxing about that, particularly when we felt responsible for so much of our celebration in the Headlands.

To City Hall, we wore clothes we already owned. We went to Blue Bottle Coffee’s kiosk on Linden alley for breakfast beforehand, narrowly avoiding stepping in dog poop on the sidewalk  — a sure sign that we were getting married in San Francisco.

at Blue Bottle on our wedding day

It was wonderfully ordinary but also surprisingly special. City Hall has such a strong sense of permanence and of history. It’s seen a lot. It’s been a crime scene, and a monument to marriage as a human right.

It still makes me think back to February 2004, when people in love waited in long lines, came from miles away, to be married there. The country was at war and it seemed such a grim time, and yet at San Francisco’s City Hall, all these people had gathered to declare their love. It seemed like something John and Yoko would have loved.

Being married at City Hall felt like we were part of that history. We were married in the rotunda, surrounded by our families, and with a bust of Harvey Milk looking on.

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Not every wedding venue is open to the public, and some locations may not continue to be a place you’ll want to visit (the cafe where my aunt and uncle had their first  date, for example, is now a McDonald’s on the grungy corner of Haight and Stanyan).

But I like that we can go back to City Hall — maybe in 30 years, you’ll be here with your kids, my dad said after our ceremony — and remember our first wedding. How after we were married, we walked up Hayes Street, the bouquet of daisies and ranunculus that my mom had made for me marked us as newlyweds, and had sparkling wine and burgers.

Police Blotters – March 2009

• 5:03 p.m. — A caller reported a man was on the property and set up a “teepee-type thing.”
• 3:29 p.m. — A caller reported that a male subject was on their property cutting wood. When the neighbor advised him to leave, the man pulled down his pants and exposed his rear end to her.
• 6:22 a.m. — A woman reported her neighbor was “banging loudly” at 4:30 a.m.
• 7:23 a.m. — A caller reported a woman was “yelling at Jesus.” The woman had been arrested last night.
• 3:01 p.m. — A caller reported someone trying to sell meat and seafood out of a vehicle.
• 4:22 p.m. — A caller reported someone was selling meat out of a truck.
• 5:27 a.m. — A woman reported hearing people downstairs. It was found to be the heater.
• 1:54 a.m. — A woman reported she and her boyfriend were high on mushrooms and he was stating he was going to kill her. The boyfriend came to the telephone and said he did not intend to kill her, they were “exchanging feelings.”
• 9:34 a.m. — A caller reported a woman wearing no pants (but wearing panties) had been asked to leave a business. She was located and said she found her pants and would keep them on.
• 4:26 p.m. — A man reported being drugged. The substance appeared to be moldy cheese.
• 5:20 p.m. — A caller reported someone selling steaks out a vehicle. Another caller reported at 6:21 p.m. that someone was selling meat out of the back of a black pickup truck.
• 7:35 p.m. — A caller reported receiving a call on his cell phone from a subject who sounded out of breath and was “gurgling.”
• 2:44 p.m. — A woman reported she paid a man to do yard work, and now one of her plants is missing. He frequently stands at the front of her property and yells obscenities at her.
• 2:09 p.m. — A caller from the hospital reported a man was in the emergency room, saying he was going to shoot everyone if he didn’t receive medical attention. He did not have a gun.
• 12:22 p.m. — A caller near the Pine Creek Laundromat reported that he found a suspicious item that he said belonged to the Department of Justice.
• 12:48 p.m. — A caller reported an argument with the neighbors about peacocks running loose. The neighbor said the initial caller verbally assaulted her and the other party’s donkeys are running around and her peacocks have nothing to do with it.
• 10:50 a.m. — A caller said a local business had refused to accept the return of an item they had purchased there.
• 11:21 a.m. — A caller reported a local gas station had possibly stolen money from her bank account. {I just love the use of “possibly” in this entry.}
• 2:13 p.m. — A caller reported finding six to seven bags of marijuana on the south side of the roadway. Upon contact, law enforcement determined the material was “leftover shake.”
• 12:54 a.m. — A man reported hearing funny noises. The man sounded confused and said a movie had scared him.
• 1:44 a.m. — A woman reported seeing a very red and glowing chimney on a house near hers.
• 12:23 p.m. — A man reported an ongoing issue with his neighbor yelling and screaming obscenities at him. He said he also has vehicles trespassing on his property. The neighbor said he was upset that the man was raising llamas on the property. The neighbor admitted yelling at the man, including calling the llamas (expletive) camels. They were advised to resolve the issue civilly.
• 8:24 p.m. — An elderly woman called 911 and wanted to know if 911 was the correct number to dial in an emergency. She did not have an emergency.