As The Countdown Continues, Each Day Has Its Due

Countdown: 46 days.

If you have been paying attention, you know that the event for which I am counting the days is my wedding. In 46 days, I will walk down the aisle, take the hand of my sweetheart and become a missus. I've been counting down pretty much since we set the date, and I keep track by marking the number of months and weeks on my home calendar, and months, weeks and days on my pocket calendar.

You know, in case I forget.

Honestly, though, I highly doubt I will forget, also having written on the big day, "get married, 4 p.m." and the name of the church.

It's not really that I'm excited (although I am) or impatient (I am that, too). I just like to keep track of dates. I journal pretty regularly, and I have for half my life, so I have records of many significant dates that, otherwise, I might have forgotten. Because of my habit of writing things down, my memory for dates is freakishly good. So I don't even have to look to know that today is the four-year anniversary of the day my fiance and I first met, on assignment together for the newspaper where I used to work and he still works. We didn't start dating for two years after that, so I probably wouldn't have remembered that had I not written about the assignment (and yes, I did write about the assignment, not the person with whom I had the assignment).

But even the insignificant dates become significant when they are centered around a big event, and by marking them off, in my journal, in my head or on the calendar, I feel I give them their due. Fifty-four days ago, I sat eating dinner in a Greek restaurant with my fiance, telling him this, as he laughed at me for being excited that it was exactly 100 days until our wedding.

"You may not think it's a big deal now," I told him, "but just wait until our wedding day. We'll be sitting at our reception, eating dinner, and I'm going to say to you, 'do you remember what we had for dinner 100 days ago?' You'll say 'no,' but I'll know that we ate here, and you had chicken kebabs, and I had a vegetarian plate." I went on to say that I would tell him this at the wedding, recount all the events of this day and of the party we were headed to that evening.

"I will even tell you about this conversation," I said, "and I will remind you that you didn't believe I could remember all of those details. But I will."

And as the date for the wedding gets closer, I find myself noticing something significant in every single day. Last Thursday, March 1, I realized that for the first time I could officially say "I'm getting married next month." This past Monday, when I saw the mid-season cliffhanger for NBC's Heroes, and the voice-over guy announced that the show would return on April 23, I turned to my fiance and said, "that was the last episode until after we're married." I do that with work projects, too, thinking, oh, the next time I'll talk to this client, I'll be married, or, I'd better not copy too many of these fax cover sheets, because I'll have to change the name on them in a few months.

I've begun to see my life lately in terms of "before the wedding" and "after the wedding." It's not that I feel my life will be all that different; it's just a way I'm framing events these days. It's sort of like leaving work on December 31 and realizing that you won't be back until the new year.

The fact of the matter is, when I walk down that aisle in 46 days, I probably won't care much about what I did today. I won't care what the weather was (cloudy and drizzly) what I wore (jeans and a black sweater), what I ate for lunch (Trader Joe's three-bean chili). But whether it matters or not in the long run, it's nice to know that this day was given its due.