Tenth Wedding Anniversary

Mainly I remember waiting for the bridal party to arrive. Pacing helped the nerves but not much. Amanda and I had been together for six years, living together for the last two. I had no doubts about her, about us, but that morning anxiety ruled me. I can't say for sure why, but I think that marriage seemed like a massive iron door looming before me, and I knew little about what lay beyond.

Marriage meant grown up, equated with adulthood, and we had just finished graduate school. I wanted very much to teach, but I knew that doing so wouldn't pay the bills, and we couldn't afford to go on to earn our doctorates (and even if we could, the job market was so poor that doing so might amount to nothing.

Both of us hate uncertainty, so we'd made a plan. John, who patiently paced with me, had been prodding me to try coding for a couple of years, so we were going to live off the money given to us and teach ourselves to program. We'd both suffered from math-anxiety, but John assured us that our language skills were what really mattered. Still, living as a programmer remained difficult to conceive. We were teachers of writing and literature, and we loved it. We'd fought with colleagues and faculty to make the evaluation and grading of student papers less arbitrary, creating grading charts that provided numerical rankings in specific areas, such as organization and diction and grammar. We poured our energies into our students, giving them our home phone numbers so that they could call us with questions outside of our office hours. We loved to teach and we were good at it; it just didn't pay.

We were going to listen to John, but he was ever the optimist. On more than one hike we'd be lost in the woods and he'd tell us he knew where going. After the third or fourth time that happened we'd taken to calling him Ranger Bob. What if we weren't cut out for coding? What if it went wrong? During our college days we'd racked up thousands in credit card debt. Additionally, we had $36K in student loans. While we were in school we didn't need to make any payments, but now that we were out the replayment clock was ticking. Even with the loans we'd struggled, in part because the job market was poor. The previous summer I'd first worked as a clerk in a hardware store, but all I could get were nighttime hours, so when Amanda came home I had to leave. One day she broke down sobbing because we would go the entire summer barely seeing each other. I'd submitted job applications everywhere, even tapped contacts at an internship I'd once had at the university. Seeing her cry I remembered that there was one place my pride had kept me from, so I promised her that I'd fix the situation, got in the car and drove to McDonalds. I worked there for two uncomfortable weeks before getting lucky and landing a job as a bartender.

All that pacing and anxiety was ten years ago today. So, how'd we do? We returned from our honeymoon (during which I'd nearly drowned) and dove into learning VB4, creating a little demo book and video store using images and video clips I pulled off of the Grolier Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. That demo soon led me to a recruiter who landed me a job as an editor of perhaps the first business-to-business website, where I'd later become the webmaster. A year and a half after the wedding I started at Gartner Group, where I sat next to Andre Cayo, who helped create Grolier Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. Amanda landed a tech job at Cigna Health Care, quickly rising into management. In four years all of our credit cards were paid off and we bought our first house. Today we have two children, and Amanda has changed careers to become a nurse. I haven't published anything yet, but I guess we've done ok.