Nine

Nine Years

That's how long I've been married. When you get to nine years you earn the right to do away with those cliched posts about the person being your soul mate. You don't have to break out into a Dreamgirls number (When I first saw you, I said 'Oh my!' That's a dream. That's my dream.) Nope, I'm above all of that now. I'm gonna speak the truth.

I wanna believe that on the day I got married seven or eight hundred women all got a text message on their we-don't-exist-yet-iPhones that said "Ordale J Allen has exited the tournament." Truth be told, I wanna believe that somewhere on the other side of the country was an arena filled with eight or nine thousand women all staring up at a jumbotron screen to watch a closed caption feed of my wedding and that they all broke out into tears when I said I do.

Some caught the holy ghost like at church and the old women with the white blouses and little white hats had to come lock arms around them to keep them from holy ghosting over a rail and falling to the ground below. At the same time over at the Staples Center in LA it was standing room only as a stadium full of men watched the wedding and celebrated my exit as a sign that they no longer had to compete with me anymore. Ordinary, sub-par, tacky "balloon with the bear inside of it" Valentine Day gift buying men rejoiced all over the world. That's what I choose to believe. If you're shaking your head at the screen you can stop now. 1) I can't see you and 2) You don't know any more than I do whether that happened or not.

In any case, what I do know is that I stood up at the front of that church and watched my wife walk down the aisle crying the whole time. As she approached me and we turned to face the preacher I leaned over and whispered something very sweet, touching and personal. "Well goddamn, did you change your mind? What's the crying for? Expecting somebody else?" In classic Ordale's Wife fashion she immediately stopped crying, leaned over to me and whispered back, "Ever since the day I was born, I've been trained to serve you."

It was in that moment that I knew we were gonna be okay. As the preacher stood there reading something about marriage and fidelity and blah blah blah, we stood there whispering back and forth:
"Bark like a dog."
"Arf, arf, arf."
"A big dog."
"Woof, woof, woof, woof"
"Hop on one leg" (She just laughed at that one)
"Make a noise like an orangutan"

At that the preacher shot us an evil look like "How dare you!" By this point someone was singing a song and I leaned back over and whispered, "It would be funny as hell if she broke out into 'She's Your Queen to Be' right now." My wife laughed out loud, the preacher shooshed us and I just rolled my eyes like "This is my damned wedding. If I wanna do the little African dance from the movie right now there aint nothing you can do about it."

Nine years later...here we are. I only have one thing to say to my wife:
Who the hell told you to stop barking?