Book of Days

Sometimes our celebrations are our very own days, very personal to us or to our families. On the 29th of May in 1949, two good looking kids tied the knot at St. Blaise Church in Brooklyn, New York. Those are my folks, and tonight we’ll be celebrating their 66th wedding anniversary. We’ll celebrate as has been our custom for the past seven years: with dinner at Rhythm Café in West Palm Beach, where, sometimes after dessert, Ken or Dennis will turn on the mirrored disco ball and urge Millie and John to get up and dance.

Legend has it that back in 1949, this event almost didn’t even happen because of a big fight. It had something to do with a jar of mustard the day before the wedding. But they got past the Mustard Incident and here we are 66 years later.

We all have these red letter days: birthdays, anniversaries, and we celebrate them in our own ways and that is one thing that’s so special about them. There is no proper way to celebrate them; we just do. We even have a custom, in my family, of celebrating birthdays of people who have passed. It’s a cue we took from a book titled Having Our Say: The Delany Sisters’ First 100 Years (1994). The title is pretty self explanatory, but one thing I really liked in the book is the way those two sisters, Sadie and Bessie, remember those who have passed by celebrating the birthdays of those folks by preparing their favorite meals. And so we began doing that, too. We don’t do it every year for every birthday (sometimes it’s tough work making homemade pizza on Grandma’s birthday if you’ve been at work all day), but we do it as often as can. It is fitting, and it is good.

These are the celebrations of our own, and we all have them, you and me and everyone else.

Image: Millie & Johnny at the photographer’s studio on the occasion of their engagement. That was 1948.