I've been putting together a web gallery of pics from my honeymoon with my wife. She takes offense at this picture, stating that its only purpose is to focus on alcohol. That might be true, though she is at the spiritual center of the composition. She's practically a Christian saint the way that I've adorned her with gold, and Frankenstein, and Mr. stir... She says that she doesn't want our honeymoon pictures to focus on drinking. I maintain that's virtually all we did and we're very lucky to have any pictures at all suggesting otherwise. This picture is especially offensive to her as it seems to focus on an excessive amount of alcohol, which happens to be delicious Grimbergen bier. When she went away to the restroom I tried to order two beers, in French of course. The word "deux" wasn't the first thing that came to my mind, instead "trois" seemed much closer (phonetically) to two, so that's what I ordered, "trois biers." The beers arrived at our table right about the same time my wife re-appeared from the restroom, much to everyone's surprise and confusion. To avoid any more awkwardness I simply agreed that all was right and this is what we wanted and I sat there with my wife, acting as if there was perhaps a third person coming to meet us, all the while sipping two beers in the perfectly normal manner of a man drinking beer anywhere, happy to be on holiday.
I suspect this picture might not make it into the final selection of honeymoon pics, and there was a story to tell, however meager. I simply didn't want the story of the extra Grimbergen to be lost.
There are other pictures that were never in any danger of making their way into the final cut of our Francey-moon pics. Ones that somehow never got deleted from within the camera, oddly-angled mistakes, some drunken, some just shots of nothing seemingly interesting, the glowing warmth of alcohol and love imbuing the moment with some special transitory significance that, for whatever reason, left no evidence of itself in the resulting picture.
But I like this picture of my wife. It reminds me of times we spent together when we were younger, before being married, partying, and drinking, and wearing sunglasses while drinking beer... in Manchester, or Los Angeles, or Costa Rica, even New York. It reminds me of a less encumbered time, one in which we gladly gave up to one another the very postures we were projecting, when we were falling in love, and laughing and finding our way through it all. And yes, we were drinking, and still laughing more, and pretending. But I still see her now sometimes like I saw her then: lovely and tipsy and silly, and becoming mine.
I think I might have even shared the third bier with her, such was my intoxication with the moment.
