Our Sanitized and Socially Distanced Wedding Anniversary

Celebrate togetherness while keeping your distance

Photo by Jonathan Borba on Unsplash

In the COVID-19 era, planning for an intimate event is a nightmare, even if you understand all that sciencey goobledygook released by the CDC. No more can you orchestrate a gathering of 10,000 of your closest friends at the local a football stadium. You can’t legally assemble 100 friends in the same stadium anymore. And any tiny get-together you can legally arrange requires everyone to be suited up for brain surgery.

This is a particular problem if, like me, your wedding anniversary is coming up. My wife and I have gone wacko trying to plan our forty-third. It’s an incredibly important milestone, being one higher than the answer to the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything. If you stay married that long, you attain enlightenment .(Ref: Adams, Douglas, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Wedded Bliss.)

But taking COVID-19 guidelines into account, we eventually formulated a plan that made some kind of sense. (What kind is an open question.) It begins with a carry-out dinner from a local restaurant, eaten at home in our back yard, chairs and TV trays placed six feet apart. We considered arranging lighted candles about the yard for romantic atmosphere, but during a test run the wind blew them all out, not to…