last weekend, jana and i celebrated our tenth wedding anniversary. on saturday night we picked up dinner at “the stand” in laguna beach. the stand is a little vegan restaurant with only one table in front, with a decent-sized tree growing through a hole in the middle of the table. there is one window for placing and picking up orders. if all vegan food were as hearty and tasty and varied as the meals at the stand, i would give up meat and dairy products on the spot.

anyhow, we picked up some barley soup, fruit smoothies, hummus salad and fresh-fruit granola and drove down p.c.h. a mile or so to a promontory overlooking emerald bay. this was where i proposed to jana, ten years + five months ago. we got there right as the sun was setting, and sat down side-by-side and ate our meal watching the orange sink into the sea and spill out into the horizon. we let the cool, moist air wash over us as we watched families, friends and lovers as they talked and giggled and kissed. we listened as an old man in a dirty jean jacket quietly seranaded the night with his guitar, his cocker spaniel sitting silently at his side. bright venus peeked through a dark opening in the clouds. when things got too chilly, we drove to ikea, and with much mirth, chose a couple of square, unfinished wooden stools to use as night stands instead of the three to ten times more expensive furniture explicitly labeled “night stands”.

it was open-mike sunday in church, so i publically proclaimed our membership in the ten-year club and declared my love and gratitude for jana, but no-one seemed interested–i’ll explain why in one of my next posts. i said how blessed i was to have jana as “my best friend, lover, partner-in-crime, savior on mount zion, and personal goddess.”

yesterday, we made homemade soap (i may have to explain this later, as well) and jana painted one wall of our bedroom an adobe red. we made love to the smell of fresh paint. (i may have erotic associations with both adobe red and paint smell from now on…)

we didn’t do any of the things you’re supposed to do on your tenth anniversary, like take a second honeymoon, or buy expensive jewelry, or go on a cruise, or eat dinner at a fancy restaurant, or whatever it is people do who make it this far. both jana and i were concerned at times and apologetic to each other. “maybe we should have done something more memorable,” we lamented.

but in the end, we celebrated simplicity. we celebrated doing things our own way, and we celebrated just being with each other. our move back to the university, our rejection of the inanity of the “keeping up with the joneses” approach to living, this seems like adventure enough. i am recording this because, when we look back on this many years from now, i want us to be able to remember that we did celebrate our tenth anniversary in a manner that was uniquely us and deeply satisfying to the both of us::