
Recently, my husband Jamie and I celebrated our wedding anniversary, and I used the occasion to write a toast to him.
Although I love Jamie with all my heart, I rarely pause to tell him—let alone other people—how I feel about him. I hope it made him happy to hear what I wrote; I know it made me happy to put my deepest feelings into words, to pay tribute to him.
Here’s what I said:
Tonight is actually a double celebration. It marks our wedding anniversary, of course.
It also marks the 10th anniversary of the day that Jamie was pronounced “cured” of the hepatitis C that he’d picked up during a heart operation when he was eight years old. January 9, 2015, when a test reported that the virus was “not detected,” was the most purely happy day of my life.
I’ve been trying to figure out how to explain how I feel at this double celebration.
Anyone who knows me knows that I love to quote from the great masterpieces of literature. On a less elevated level, I also love to quote from the TV show The Office. One of my favorite family games is to interrupt some moment that’s unfolding to say, “Quick, what scene from The Office am I thinking of?”
So to convey how I feel about Jamie, I will express myself through these vehicles.
First, to tell you how much I love Jamie in terms of The Office, I will say: Jamie, I love you as much as Pam loves Jim, as much as Angela loves Dwight, and as much as Holly loves Michael. That’s a lot!
And now I will convey my love for Jamie by comparing him through literature to the city of Paris and to a rose. (You may not think Jamie is very Paris-like or very rose-like, but hear me out.)
In the first line of her novel Paris France, Gertrude Stein observes, “Paris, France is exciting and peaceful.”
And when I read that, I thought of Jamie.
A few weeks after Jamie and I started dating, we went to get Chinese food, and I got a fortune cookie that predicted, “Your life will be happy and peaceful.”
I have to admit, even that early in our relationship, I felt very sure that we would spend our lives together.
Perhaps with some premonition of this very evening, I’ve kept that fortune ever since, framed with the first photograph I ever possessed that showed Jamie and me together, at a Yale Law school party in 1992.
And my life with Jamie has been happy and peaceful, just as the fortune cookie predicted.
And even better, like Paris, it has also been exciting.
We’ve had many thrilling ups and difficult downs and big changes and challenges—and throughout, Jamie’s presence and his steadfast love has made our lives together exciting and peaceful.
So Jamie is like Paris.
And Jamie is also like a rose.
One challenge of thirty years of marriage is not to take each other for granted. At this point, astonishingly, now we’ve lived more of our lives together than we lived separately.
But although he’s so familiar, I never want to take Jamie for granted—his loving heart, his integrity, his brilliance, his dedication to family, his creativity, his commitment to civic life, his astonishing memory for names and faces. I never want to let him fade into the wallpaper of my life.
In that effort, I often think of Wendell Berry’s short poem, “The Wild Rose.”
Sometimes hidden from me
in daily custom and in trust,
so that I live by you unaware
as by the beating of my heart,
suddenly you flare in my sight,
a wild rose blooming at the edge
of thicket, grace and light
where yesterday was only shade,
and once more I am blessed, choosing
again what I chose before.
I will always choose again Jamie—my Paris, my rose.
Now we go to live happily ever after.