All of Me

35 years married to the same person. Isn’t that incredible? Last week, Madeleine and I marked our 35th wedding anniversary with the customary photo of us sausaged in our original wedding attire, surrounded by mementos of the current year. This year's mementos consisted of 16 squirmy kids that make up Madeleine’s Grade 3 class. Needless to say, the kids were impressed. One of Madeleine’s little darlings, a girl named Mandy, (all Thai kids at our school get to choose a ‘western’ name, otherwise the ‘western’ teachers would be tongue twisted all day) couldn’t believe that we had been married for so long, and that probably her parents were not even born that day long ago when we got married, and, how could we have taken a picture way back then when, like, were cameras even invented then? and, …drop it kid, we’re talking 35 years here, not millennia!  Note to self: Mandy will not be getting the Principal’s Student of the Year award at the end of the school year. 

We do this every year and some years the photo taking ritual is more eventful than others. Let’s take last year’s photo shoot as example….

We were in China, working at the Canada-Zibo Secondary School, in the middle of nowhere, Shangdong Province. We were in China, but our shipment from West Africa was not. Ten of our boxes had been ‘forgotten’ in some warehouse somewhere on the black continent.  Our shipping people, a most reputable company that had been recommended to me by a friend of a friend’s uncle, assured us that our errant boxes were not lost, but temporarily deviated from their supposedly two month journey from Banjul, West Africa, to Vancouver, Canada.  Not that there was anything super valuable in those boxes (how many of those African masks does one need to make one's life complete?), and having put enough insurance on those boxes to set me up for life, I would normally have been not too unhappy if those boxes had gone the way of the Titanic on their crossing over from Africa.  However, there was one piece of clothing in one of those stray boxes that was valuable…Madeleine’s wedding dress.  So here we were, in China, our anniversary fast approaching, and Madeleine was sans robe de mariée. Woe is me!

Well, word of our unfortunate quandary quickly spread around the school.  We had once told one of our Chinese teacher counterparts of our wedding anniversary ritual and as our anniversary approached, he hastened to organize the photo shoot and in no time, everyone at the school, all 130 kids, wanted to be part of the much anticipated and already famed yet not happened anniversary picture taking session. Now, I have to say here, the students we worked with in China were some of the most endearing kids we have ever had the pleasure of working with during our 75 combined years of teaching. They were truly amazing kids and we were very happy to include all of them in our 34th wedding anniversary portrait…but, no dress…

However, let us not forget, we were in Mao land here! Things get done, and done quickly, in China. Big things get done in China. You want the Olympics…bang…you’ve got the biggest Olympics in history. You want bridges built…bang…you have these huge elegant structures sprouting almost overnight over every river in China. You want another subway line built in Shanghai…bang…within a year you have the masses riding a new 16-kilometre metro line (now, how long has the Evergreen Line in Vancouver been under construction…5, going on 6 years?). So how difficult would it be to find a little wedding dress for a photo shoot?  No problemo. Just leave it to Charles.

Charles was a Grade 10 boy. Charles was not his real name; it was his ‘western’ name, just like the Thai kids. Charles loved Madeleine. As a matter of fact, all Grade 10 boys loved Madeleine. Actually, they worshiped the ground she walked on. Don’t ask me why, they just did. Charles’ mom worked at a costume/bridal shop in downtown Zibo. Charles told his mom about our unfortunate wedding-dress-gone-missing dilemma. Charles’ mom invited us to her shop to look at her vast inventory of wedding attire, contemporary and traditional.  So we did.  And presto, we not only had a dress for the bride, but the groom also snatched up this snazzy little number from the 16th century Qing Dynasty.     

Cutting to the chase…the whole student body assembled in the auditorium and after showing them a 33 slide retrospective presentation of the past 33 May 16s, my bride of 34 years looked dazzling as she walked down the aisle of the auditorium, to the many Chinese sounding ooohs and aaahs, interspersed by the uncontrollable sobs of the emotional Grade 12 girls sitting in the front row, and to the processional song of All of Me, sung by Freddie, our very own in-house Grade 11 Chinese Pavarotti. Madeleine looked splendidly majestic in her mid-16th century imperial court bright red robe decorated with multicoloured images of birds of some sort. And her head gear... difficult to find words to describe it other than beautiful in its stunningly ostentatious gaudiness, like a rare find you'd luckily come across by chance at Value Village.  She looked like a veritable Mardi Gras float! While all eyes were on Madeleine, I quickly got into my traditional Qing Dynasty wedding attire, just another you-gotta-see-it-to-believe-it dragon robes that supposedly only emperors had the privilege of wearing, sumptuously embroidered with one front dragon and, the joining of the left and right borders had decorative dragons each…in a nutshell, a whole lot of dragons.  With all those dragons, how can one not feel very…je ne sais quoi, very empirical, very powerful, very virile… no wonder Genghis Khan is reputed to have sired hundreds of children.




Once Madeleine reached her Genghis Khan in the front of the auditorium, we invited everyone out on the steps of the school for a 34th wedding anniversary photo shoot, surrounded by all of our adopted children. A truly surreal event. And the Grade 12 girls continued to sob.