Well, I blew it again. When I saw the date on my work calendar, today, I froze. It looked familiar. Slowly, my body was overtaken by that sinking feeling when you know there’s something important about the day, but you can’t remember what, and you hope you figure it out, but you also hope you don’t, because that would mean you’re about to get your ass kicked for forgetting it.
Then it hit me: my wedding anniversary.
Oh, shit. I had no card waiting for Sarah, no big present, no romantic dinner planned. Bupkus. I remembered to change my fantasy football roster, and I had forgotten my own wedding anniversary. This was not good, particularly after my lackluster birthday performance a few months back.
Quickly, I went on FTD.com and had some flowers delivered to her at school, but it didn’t seem sufficient. Should I call her immediately? (No. Think.) Should I take a cab to school and profess my love to her in front of everyone? (Too Hollywood.) Should I pretend I had a surprise lined up all along? (Then you’d have to plan a surprise, you bonehead. THINK.)
Just then, an e-mail appeared in my inbox. It was from my cousin Carol, wishing me a happy anniversary. Then I saw she had CC’ed Sarah too.
A minute later, the phone rang. I picked it up and braced for the worst.
“Did you know this was our anniversary?” Sarah asked in a weird voice.
“Well . . . “
“I saw that e-mail from Carol and I had no clue what she was talking about until I looked at my calendar.” She laughed. “I totally spaced it.”
“Yeah, me too.” I wanted to tell her that I had actually remembered before Carol’s email, but those hairs were so thin they were not worth splitting. “I’m sorry, Sarah.”
“We forgot our own wedding anniversary,” she said. “We are so lame.”
“I know. This is really embarrassing.”
“We’ve got so much going on right now.”
“So much.”
“We’re lucky we remember to go to work.”
“Totally lucky.”
“Well,” she said. “Happy anniversary.”
“Happy anniversary. I love you, Sarah.”
“I love you too.”
The rush-job bouquet arrived a couple hours later, and she loved it. Exhale. Thank God my wife’s brain and body are currently going haywire. I had dodged a major bullet, and my bulletproof vest had been the pregnancy.
Meanwhile, seeing the fetus’s profile really did a number on my wife. She’s not normally not a pensive person; in fact, her two daily settings are Frenetic and Asleep. But lately she’s been all distracted and schmoopy. “Everybody says when you have a baby everything will change, and that you’ll be filled with all these feelings of overwhelming love,” she said. “But they never say how or when it will happen. Oh, I don’t know what I’m saying. The truth is, I really just can’t wait to meet the kid.”
Me neither. But If this were a marathon, we’d only be at mile 17. And I know that because I actually did the math when I should have been buying my wife an anniversary card.