I have a confession to make: I want to get married on the anniversary of a national disaster.
If I had it my way, I’d get married next year on October 9, but this isn’t Burger King. And this goes way beyond just me, too. It’s a ponderous decision: should we get married on September 11, 2010?
I’ve received mixed reactions from folks. And to tell the truth, I wasn’t always so big on the idea, either. My first inclination was pretty much “yeah, no, that’s out.” But over time it’s grown on me. The last thing I want to do is convey disrespect, of course. I was there, and the terrorist attacks affected me as deeply as anyone else. But tragedy is just as much a part of life as joy is, and the celebration of joy in the face of tragedy can be cathartic. Time has a way of moving us on.
I’ve likened the issue to Pearl Harbor: Over time, the ominous connotations of December 7 have faded. Of course, the events of that day in 1941 aren’t usually referred to as “December 7”—at least not in a long time, anyway (there is some historical evidence to the contrary). The fact that Americans commonly refer to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 as “September 11” makes it that much more difficult to disassociate the pain of those attacks from what was formerly just an innocuous day in the Roman calendar.
Even though that date will gradually regain its normalcy over time, we’d have to accept that September 11 would probably always cast a shadow on our anniversary. At the very least, I assume we’d be committing ourselves to a lifetime of raised eyebrows every time someone asks when we got married.
So why am I considering it? There’s no easy or meaningful way to answer that. This sounds frivolous, yes, but most of what it comes down to is I just like 09.11.10 better than any of the other potential dates in our range, dammit. It’s partly a designer thing (the digits look great next to each other), and partly a fetish for odd numbers. Yeah, and you were expecting an earnest analysis of the tableau of human suffering, weren’t you?
I don’t know what to do, yet. Obviously, it’s a decision that the beau and I must mutually agree on. If we go this route, we are going to encounter some resistance from some people (among them, my mother).
Do numbers really matter? No. Then again, they can mean certain things to certain people. And regardless of what day we get married, our primary goal remains intact: to create our own meaning.
