Instead of a 30th Wedding Anniversary, a New Beginning

I got married 30 years ago today, which should be a big deal. And it is. Except we didn't make it. Rather than spending it clicking wine glasses with the man who became my husband on April 4th, 1992 (that's my dad walking me down the aisle above), I'm unpacking boxes and bags after a move from Austin, Texas, to an apartment in the East Village of New York City. And I'm OK with that. More than OK, but still there's a tug at my heart today because the timing of this post-divorce chapter—returning to the Big Apple exactly 40 years after I first moved here post-college—has prompted a flood of contradictory emotions.

I'm feeling sweet nostalgia for the people my ex-husband and I were when we joined hands at the altar of a small, adobe chapel on the Texas-Mexico border. He was the love of my life then; I'm quite sure I was his. It was a small, strange ceremony. We were married by a justice of the peace, but my mother said that the talk the JOP gave was the better than any she heard from a man of the cloth at the weddings of her other five kids. In his sermon about staying connected to each other over time and distance, he mentioned that he was a HAM radio operator and that he regularly talked to explorers from Antarctica. I stopped the JOP in the middle of his oration and said that my beloved had just been in Antartica and had called me via a HAM operator. We were awed by the idea that this man who was marrying us may have been the same person who facilitated our patched-through call a few weeks earlier. Somehow the world seemed to be working in our favor--a sense that I would maintained for a couple of decades.