My Favorite Zaadzster

It started in January with a note:

'kay, I think zaadz is way cool, but social networking only works if you network, right…how the hell else are we gonna save the world? ;-)

So I'm looking for folks who share my interests and who've actually logged into zaadz sometime more recently than six months ago.

Anyway, my name is Barbara and I'm pleased to meet you.

I couldn't ignore that one, even though I promised to - she didn't follow my "friending rules" by tying our interests together three ways in her friend request.

It's amazing how much your life can change when you don't follow the rules.

We sent messages on Zaadz, then MySpace, then email. Our first phone conversation covered a discussion thread on the Appropriate Transportation Pod. Soon we were talking on the phone regularly, and often that conversation focused on the 2,198 miles between us - her in Oregon, me in Wisconsin.

So I flew to Oregon.

You know how awesome a homecoming can be, and sometimes the longer the separation, the more rewarding the reuniting. Our separation stretched out for a very, very long time. Since we'd never in this lifetime met before, you might even say it'd gone on forever. I'll spare most of the details, but when we stood in line at the airport for my return flight, we bound our hands wordlessly.

The next three-plus weeks were filled with emails and phone calls, and I think it was about that time we stopped hanging up, choosing instead to fall asleep together on the phone. Then she flew to Wisconsin.

I should mention that her thoughtful and very geeky spreadsheet considering the relative merits of living in western Oregon verses eastern Wisconsin had been abandoned by then. Her children could move with her; mine could not. She was visiting Wisconsin first to complete our need for connection in the present, and second to make that connection real and permanent.

Our third - and final - separation was two weeks and two days. In and around her visit to Wisconsin, we'd carried on a thoughtful, intellectual email conversation about marriage, what we do or don't believe, the role of the state, etc. I owed her a long email expounding on aspects I'd only touched on. When I sent it, one week before flying back to Oregon, it went like this:

I've been thinking about this email, and how to concisely communicate my thoughts.

This is what I settled on.

Would you like to get married next Friday?

Her response was even more concise, and so we did.

She tells the story almost poetically, which is hardly surprising, as she's a poet. Maybe someday she'll write a poem about it specifically. Maybe she already is. My version goes like this.

She'd had a couple nightmares in which we went to the courthouse for a marriage license and they'd refused to issue us one. The night before I flew out, I couldn't find my divorce decree, and though I shouldn't have even needed it - Oregon asks only for the date of dissolution - I was a bit freaked by that, until I found it. I think neither of us were completely able to believe everything would come together flawlessly; we were operating outside of the culturally-accepted norms. We didn't have a party planned. My children were in Wisconsin, and her's chose not to attend, wanting instead to wait for our next celebration, the commitment ceremony that makes us all into a family, with her children and mine participating. We didn't have witnesses lined up, but we did have an officiant more-or-less on call. Applying for the license and receiving it took about ten minutes. We were barely out of the courthouse before she called her friend Angela, our officiant, who said "So, I suppose you'd like to get married now, huh?"

I like coffee shops. I like coffee, too. Barbara doesn't drink the stuff, and sometimes even has an allergic reaction to coffee shops. But she found one she likes in Eugene called The Wandering Goat. For some reason when she first told me of this place, I absent-mindedly forgot the name, so for evermore this coffee shop will be The Wounded Pig in my memory...

Angela got on her bike to meet us there. We selected two witnesses at random, beautiful people named Shaney and Heather. Shaney was not only wearing a cool straw hat, but is also ordained and could have married us. Heather wrote the book Food Not Lawns and agreed to witness our marriage as long as we were comfortable with the fact that she is fundamentally opposed to our system of marriage in this country. Our response was simple - we are too, and that makes her a perfect witness. (Actually, she told us half-way through, this was the second time she'd been randomly selected to serve as an official witness for a wedding at Wounded Pig.) We had a vegan cupcake for a wedding cake, I wore a sock garter out of Shaney's pocket, another patron volunteered to take wedding pictures, and the businessman behind us presented highlighters as wedding gifts. We were married.

I'm on record saying I'd never again invite the church or the state into one of my relationships, and yet I got legally married with two ministers participating in the ceremony. Hmmph. Since then I've been asked about this discordance, and I can only say I found someone is doesn't believe in marriage any more than I do.

Together, we define marriage to suit our beliefs.