Love Thursday #6,997,423

Things have been a little crazy here today (crazy in that "all I can do is sit on the couch and finish knitting this dang sock and wait for the UPS delivery guy" kind of way) but I didn't want to let this day get lost in the haze of furniture assembly because all over the blogoshere, it's Love Thursday and DUDES, have I got a really, really good Love Thursday story for you. You'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll wear mismatched socks...

(Speaking of socks--and I know y'all are just dying to speak MORE of socks, right? --I finished the first of my Edward socks. Here it is, along with its namesake. I like to name my socks after whatever it is that I'm knitting into the fabric and in this case, it was my concern and love for my missing and miraculously returned kitty. The yarn is Claudia hand-paint in the flavor pistachio (it was a gift from my good friend and erstwhile baby-sitter, Stefanie, who gave it to me with the proviso that I use it to knit MYSELF some socks. That selfish b-word. (Just kidding--isn't she lovely??) and I just knitted my usual bamboo-stitch sock. The cat is your basic Miracle Orange Tabby.)

So, back to Love Thursday... no wait, first we must go way, WAY back to my childhood. I've written before about my father and how he was electrocuted in Vietnam when I was five years old. Well, when I was sixteen, my mother went on a date with a man named Jerry (the story of their first date and how my sister and I called the police and reported my mother missing is the stuff of family legend. I'm saving it for a day when I have writer's block.)

Anyway, this Jerry guy just hung around and hung around and hung around and every year, he asked my mother to marry him. And every year, she, the pragmatic German, said no; she just didn't really see the point.

When I say that Jerry "hung around," I mean that in the sense that he was in every way the father that I'd missed for all those years. I mean it in the sense that he gave me away at my wedding. I mean it in the sense that for twenty seven years, he has offered his gentle and wise counsel to me and my siblings and has been the unconditional support and rock my mother needed.

I mean it in the sense that he once wrote to me that I was the daughter everyone wishes for. (Only, he used better grammar. But he wrote it in German and that's as close a translation as I can do.)

I have to say that it can't have been easy. I mean, I know I was extra vigilant in looking for reasons to dislike anyone who dared to try to take my father's place in my life. But he never tried to do that, see. He was just always my wise, super-smart, loving, gentle friend. And even more important for this approval-starved kid, he showed me quietly and unwaveringly, that he was my biggest fan.

I quite love him.

So anyway, it's been 27 years. And do you know what those two impetuous love-birds did on Friday?

They got married.

And get this, my mother is changing her name! I don't know why, but nothing touched me as much as that, for some reason.

Unless it was the way her voice sounded when we spoke on the telephone this morning and she said, "And here's my husband now." I wish I had a recording of that to play back... it was one of the sweetest things I've ever heard.

You did good, Mom. I think he's a keeper.