Wedding Note:
Not-Silver Souvenir
23 May 2019
¶ My newly-rigorous policy of leaving no closet unplumbed and no storage box left to moulder has turned up some interesting items. The latest, it is true, surfaced some time ago, and was wedged in a pile of oblongs — books and papers, mostly — in the dining ell. Having straightened up all of that area’s bohemian corners, and covered half the dining table with stuff to deal with once and for all, I found a small (but not very small) box wrapped in a silver-cloth bag. I figured that it was a silver frame or photograph album, but although it said “Cartier” on the box it turned out to be the engraving block from which our wedding invitations (3 October 1981) were printed. The answer to the obvious question — why was this thing floating around, instead of being packed with all the other wedding memorabilia — was that there was unfinished business.
What you were supposed to do as a young married couple in those days was to buy a handsome silver tray and to have the wedding invitation printed on it. I don’t know what the permissible time frame was, but I suspect that, now approaching our thirty-eighth anniversary, Kathleen and I have let the job go well past the outer limit. When we were a young married couple, however, we could not really afford to buy handsome silver trays, and by the time we could, we were not making much use of the handsome silver trays (none of them blank) that had by then come into our possession.
The solution, now that I was determined to finish the business somehow, was obvious. Whenever I’ve got to figure out what to do with something nice or interesting that is also relatively flat, I have it framed.
Not out of the woods yet, though. Where on earth — this apartment’s walls — will I hang it? Stay tuned.