Tuesday was Bear and my 8th wedding anniversary.
It’s kind of amazing that it’s only been eight years and at the same time I feel like such an old lady. We’ve been through more in our eight years than most people deal with in a lifetime. Other than infidelity, I cannot think of a single challenge we haven’t been through. Try to stump me, I dare you.
This anniversary, coming in the middle of major job issues, renewed fertility issues (more on that in another post), my own personal quarter-life crisis, house issues, blah blah blah, was a little awkward to celebrate. We’re more in love than ever, but it’s hard to really celebrate anything when you have no idea what tomorrow will bring.
Earlier in the month we went to Avenue Q to celebrate, and we have to save every penny we can get our hands on should we have to move, so we didn’t exchange presents. Instead we just went out to Black Angus (with a coupon). Whenever we go we always order the same thing, Bear gets a steak and I get the prime rib, and it’s always just fine. Nothing spectacular, but a nice hunk of meat. Normally we love discovering new restaurants, but that’s always hit and miss, and for our anniversary we wanted something we could count on to be edible.
We should have realized we were in trouble when the coupon was expired. It was a warning. But we had already ordered drinks and eaten all the bread, so we figured we’d just suck it up and pay the extra ten bucks. From that point on, absolutely nothing went right. Someone tried to help our cute waitress by refilling our drinks and then forgot to bring them back. Bear ordered a medium well steak and it came out bleeding. I paid extra to have asparagus as a side and they came out like charcoal. I hate sending food back, it’s usually more trouble than it’s worth, but I paid extra for the asparagus, dangit, so I asked for new veggies.
While our cute waitress was attending to that, I started tucking in to my prime rib only to find a big yellow chunk of sponge cuddling up to my meat. I poked at it a couple of times, thinking it must surely just be a piece of breading that hopped aboard, but no, that was definitely not edible. I showed Bear and let him poke at it before I said anything. Sure enough, “Is that a SPONGE?” Bear and I just looked at each other and burst out laughing.
Our cute waitress came out with some beautifully grilled asparagus, apologizing all over herself, and I had to break the bad news that some charred asparagus was now the least of her problems. She just grabbed the plate away from me as her face paled and said her manager would be right over. Bear and I were laughing so hard we sounded crazy. Crazy, unhinged, manic laughter. We were pounding each other on the back and crying. Little old people all over the restaurant were shooting us stink eyes.
The manager came over, humiliated, and begged our forgiveness, explaining that this never ever happened. They had run out of the sponges they normally use to wipe down the edges of the plates before sending them out, and had grabbed the cheap kind from Wal-Mart that had apparently disintegrated as soon as it hit my plate. Plus, the asparagus was going out of season so their last shipment was full of tiny little guys that the cooks were still grilling as long as the big fat ones from July. She bought my steak, she offered us dessert and wine, she did all but rend her clothes in two.
Meanwhile, we were still fighting the giggles about Spongeprime ribpants that I’d been mowing down. We both knew, without even saying a word, that this was a perfectly fitting way to spend our anniversary. Of course my fabulous meal would end up inedible. Of course the one freak lapse in quality at a great restaurant would happen on our plates. We go in shooting for upper class and get our butts kicked. It’s totally appropriate that as we sit across from each other, holding hands and basking in our love, what comes our way is not what we ordered.