“My wife has a beard of bees.”
“My wife no longer requires this bowling trophy.”
“My wife’s incisor is stuck in your dreadful peanut brittle.”
These are just some of the phrases which, as of this week, I have the right to use. In fact, I could now use any one of an arsenal of wife-based phrases.
Yes, Samara and I were married on Monday the 28th.
Tax dodge.
Also love.
Neither of us could quite face the shame of a full synagogue wedding, so we hired a rogue Rabbi and a portable chuppah for a home ceremony with just six guests. It was lovely. Other relatives joined us for a little cocktail party afterwards, with music and merriment and fancy cakes. It was a good day, and it left us both very happy.
I also got a coconut out of it. Dear Diary!
My new mother-in-law (an entire untapped genre of jokes open to me there, incidentally) had read in this very diary that an item on my bucket list was “to drink from a real coconut”.
“You remember that bucket list item you mentioned on your blog?”
“To eat the first-prize giant vegetable from a county fair?!”
“No, the coconut one.”
“I’m listening.”
Some of the guests remarked on how easy it would be to drink from a coconut and that it wasn’t really worth putting on a bucket list. But where are those people now? Toronto mostly. And let that be a lesson to them.
The idea of drinking from a coconut has appealed to me since January this year when I’d anticipated getting the chance to do so in Hawaii. Sadly, the bars there only seem to serve the world-famous Hawaiian piña colada in plastic coconuts. What kind of crap is that? A plastic coconut? Get some class. Real sophisticates drink from real coconuts.
And today was the day. Monday 28th will always stand out in my memory as The Day of the Coconut. And for some other stuff too.
We soon found out that opening a coconut with even the best kitchen meat cleaver is like trying to get into Princeton armed with an Applied Learning Certificate from Dudley College.
It’s not like peeling a banana or shelling a cashew. (Not that I was there, of course. I was busy playing Boggle with the Rabbi.)
After failing to trepan the cursed drupe with all manner of kitchen utensil and a few screwdrivers and chisels, my mother-in-law resorted to an electric saw.
Digging through the basement for a power tool capable of opening a coconut is probably not something most women imagine doing on their daughter’s wedding day.
My mother-in-law is fucking metal.
The electric saw worked like a charm and, a miniature paper parasol later, I was a married man slurping whisky and coconut water from the shell of a real coconut.
If only my childhood self could see me now. He’d probably say “What the fuck? What are you doing in Canada? And what’s that, a coconut? We were supposed to be an astronaut. Jesus Christ.”
The wedding, needless to say, was lovely.
“My husband never seems to have any change.”
“My husband dances in supermarkets, libraries and lifts.”
“Apparently, my husband runs a blog about our life together.”
Just some of the cool phrases I imagine Samara’s looking forward to using.