Anniversaries

Anniversary: 26 January 2009

Most people celebrate anniversaries of one sort or another ~ birthdays, weddings, special or significant days in their lives. Today is the anniversary of the day I met my girlfriend.

We celebrated it (sort of) on Saturday night instead of today, Monday. We met at a lesbian dance called Hot Flash. It’s a good time mob scene at a club in Portland’s Old Town district. They bill themselves as “seasoned sapphists and their allies” or something like that. It’s a great thing for women of a certain age and orientation to have a dance of our own. The youngsters have all sorts of L4L dances and really, their music is marginal. This one is ours and there are a lot of us.

So we decided that we would always celebrate by going to the January Hot Flash dance and call it our anniversary. But, then we started talking about other significant dates and there are a few. Should we mark the date that we first slept together? How about the date that we decided to be in an exclusive relationship? Or when she moved into my house? What about the day we filed for domestic partnership, that’s pretty significant. Of course, we are holding out for a “wedding anniversary” someday.

We thought about going to California last summer and getting married. But, our families are here in Oregon and Washington and we want to celebrate the day with them. And, then the opportunity was snatched away. We are not going to Massachusetts to get married, or Canada. We want a local option! We want to get married in our town, and have our government recognize our union. City, county, state and federal recognition is what I’m aiming for. I want to be able to file a joint tax return, and share the meager crumbs of each other’s Social Security. I don’t believe that’s too much to ask.

But, that giant issue aside, when we are allowed to marry, we will be picking a date between November and April. When we met we were the same age and I loved that fact. Since my birthday is in April, for half the year I am older than she. I like it to be even. We like our relationship to be 50/50 as much as possible. So, sometime between November and April we’ll be creating yet another anniversary to celebrate; someday.