Pizza and Marriage

Independent Bookstore Day is tomorrow, April 29, 2017. In honor of this day, you will find my husband and I standing in line at one of Seattle’s unique community bookstores called Book Larder to get our copy of Delancey signed by local author Molly Wizenberg. 

We have been reading Delancey aloud to each other at night. It’s a memoir about starting out, about new beginnings. Molly tells the story of her first year of marriage, during which her husband Brandon starts up a New York style pizza restaurant in Seattle without any prior business experience. While Brandon sweats to find a real estate deal, build a wood-burning pizza oven and invent his crust recipe, Molly has one hand in pizza recipes and the other in writing and publishing her first book called A Homemade Life (now a New York Times bestseller). Molly writes candidly and humorously about the challenges they faced and the vision and determination her husband had to see his dream to completion. It’s a fun, local read and especially relatable for us as newlyweds.

A couple weeks ago, after spending the afternoon filing our first, joint tax return as a married couple, we decided to celebrate the occasion by going out for pizza. Of course, being in the middle of reading Delancey, there was no contest about where we would go. 

We arrived at Delancey just before 4:30 p.m. and waited outside for the restaurant to open. Before long, who emerged from the doorway but Brandon himself, rolling a large garbage bin behind him with a cheerful, impish smile on his face. We watched him disappear around the corner of the building and then come back a few minutes later with the same bin, filled to the brim with wood burning logs for the pizza oven. My anticipation increased as more smiling patrons gathered around us, waiting and expectant.

We were seated at a table for two. The table was a thick concrete block, but a lit candle warmed it. We ordered one house-made sausage pizza with mozzarella, Gana and prosciutto, and an oven-roasted radicchio salad. When our pizza arrived, the edges were blackened and blistered to perfection just as the book described. Flavors blended harmoniously together. We divided and shared it all, including lemon curd mousse and cookies for dessert.

I remembered the advice we received early on in our relationship, that love and marriage require revising the story between the two of you often. Sometimes, we need to revise our lives daily to meet the other’s needs; or in the grander scheme of life, we revise and recreate our story to grow together year after year.

In the article "Love Tips From the Very First Couple," published in The New York Times earlier this month on April 2nd, Bruce Feiler describes love being an active process, "But love is not a moment in time; it's the passage of time. It's the long-term practice of reinvention, reconciliation and renewal. Love is the act of constantly revising your own love story."

When it came to the first couple ever created, Feiler says, theirs is not the story of Adam, or the story of Eve; it is and forever will be the story of Adam and Eve. He writes, “Theirs is the first joint byline.”

One can see Molly and Brandon revising their story page by page in the book Delancey as they pursue a shared life, and every couple does. Herein lies the great potential, and responsibility, even the key to making a love story last.

That’s Brandon waving hello in front of the pizza oven. And that's me giving a thumbs up!

Inside Book Larder, the walls are lined with nothing but cookbooks and books about food. Delancey being one of them. As our dating involved so much of eating our way through Seattle, I suppose it makes sense we’d find our way into the cookbook store too, hand in hand. The food we’ve bonded over and meals we’ve shared in the past two years are already in the thousands, and counting. Again and again, we agree to spread the table and raise our glasses to the life we’re writing, we’re revising, we’re publishing day by day.

Won't you join us at our table?

The Lord is Truly Our Source of Refreshment

Help! I lost my car and we are on the verge of losing our sanity on this wild ride called wedding planning and marriage preparation. When we make it to the altar, we are going to be throwing our arms up in the air and shouting “Victory! We did it!” Well, okay, not really, but our hearts will be that jubilant at least! We’ve waited, hoped, dreamed, waited some more, planned and learned to share everything with one another so that now what remains is one thing:

  “Set me as a seal on your heart, as a seal on your arm” (Song of Songs 8:6)

  “And the two shall become one flesh” (Mark 10:8)

  “Therefore what God has joined together, no human being must separate,” (Mark 10:9)

  “Be fertile and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it,” (Genesis 1:28)

And this weekend’s Gospel charges us with our continued and now joint mission as disciples of Jesus Christ by rite of our baptism. Christ sends his apostles out in pairs and reminds us of our duty as citizens of the eternal kingdom to spread the light of Christ into our families, city, our nation and our world: 

  “The harvest is abundant but the laborers are few,” (Luke 10:2)

  “I am sending you like lambs among wolves” (3)

  “Carry no money bag, no sack, no sandals” (4)

  “Whatever town you enter…say to them, ‘The kingdom of God is at hand for you.’” (8)

Yes, God is HERE among us! In fire, in wind, in water, in air. His is the light of love we share, the inspiration that guides us to create new things each day, the refreshment of our souls and the life that we breathe, that sustains us. He is our comfort amidst the daily stress of work and planning and responsibilities. 

That the Lord is our source of refreshment became evident this weekend as we sat in church, hugged round by the beautiful columns and held up in the structure, listening to the Word of God. Here God's holy humor and happiness attacked us on every side, and try as we might to suppress laughter, it seeped through anyway in our radiant smiles, a sign of the pure joy it is to just "be" together, as Robert said, without any "doing." The sacred chant of the choir and bellowing organ, our dear Dominican priest preacher, and the bliss of Holy Communion provided a nonstop flow of inspiration and peace flooding through my heart. “As a mother comforts her child, so will I comfort you,” our Lord reassured us in the 1^st reading from Isaiah 66.

We’ve been moving Robert into our soon-to-be home. One night after moving some furniture with his buddies, he picked me up for an impromptu late night date in a flatbed truck he was borrowing. He walked up to my door wearing his leather shoes, jeans and leather belt, jean jacket and Kavu baseball cap. Off we drove with the radio turned up and the manual windows rolled down, and I fell in love all over again… As we stopped at a gas station to fill up the tank, he leaned into the open passenger side window and declared with a grin, “You are a country girl. I can tell!”

Yes, my roots are in the country, but since losing my car, I have become one acquainted with the city via the Metro bus, Uber, rides from friends and dependence on my own two legs to get to the places I need to go. It’s afforded me the necessity to walk the city more. It’s the full initiation into Seattle city life before I leave it, and I am grateful for that. It's the culminating factor in dissolving my fears of living in the city as God has stripped me of my last security blanket of the car, of my independence, and I have had to become brave and do things that scare me because I wouldn’t choose them otherwise. It’s the Lord showing me how to go the right way on the bus (for more about that, click here) and to depend on Him. 

This Sunday's Scriptures are reassuring for us all, for although the disciples had nothing – no money, no car, no traveling bag – they had each other, and they had the power and zeal of the Gospel. That was all they needed. It was enough. They had the power to become all they were meant to be in Christ their strength, Christ their hope, and Christ their place of rest. 

In the end, my friends, God's behind the wheel. Let him do the driving. If we still have Him, we haven't lost anything.

Homesteading: Our First House, Gardens, Raspberry Bushes and Chickens, Oh My!

This week my fiancé and I sign our rental papers for our first house. One of us will move in over the summer and the other will follow after the wedding in August. I will tell you how it came to be.

One night my fiancé Robert had a dream. We were moving into his groomsman’s house some miles north. About a week later, lo and behold, his friend contacted him to say he and his wife were moving and asked if we were interested in renting or buying this very house from them. It is just minutes away from where Robert works.

So on a Saturday in May we drove over together so I could have a look. I did not have any expectations. As we stepped inside the front door, I was stunned by the interior beauty of the home which our friends worked hard to remodel and fashion. Hardwood floors, a cozy fireplace in the living room, a large kitchen with a wrap-around counter top and modern features, lots of beautiful wood cabinetry, two bedrooms (one in which a cat greeted us stretched out on the bed like my Ginger), a bath and a downstairs room with another fireplace, and bookshelves built into the wall. As we chatted in the kitchen, our friend pointed out the east-facing kitchen windows, which on a clear day, offer mountain views and lovely sunrises. As if the interior of the home wasn’t amazing enough, we walked outside and I kept on being amazed. There were raised garden beds and a compost, bee keeping boxes with nests inside (tended by someone else), and a chicken coop with squawking ducks and chickens! There were roses, raspberry bushes, a cherry tree and kiwi trees maturing to produce their first crop.

I was stunned. Could it be God was offering us all this without us even seeking it out? You know how we have those dreams…and sometimes they seem far off…one day I will write a book. One day I will live in a house and raise a family… one day.

But here our dreams were coming to life, as they have been in the entire past year. Here a real vision of our new life opened up before us. A nest for family, welcoming others, nurturing life, cooking, working, writing, gardening and even perhaps...yes, keeping a chicken or two! (Thanks, Flannery O’Connor.) No more tiny and overpriced apartment living or basement living. (Keep in mind, currently we both sleep in basements – my bedroom is in the basement of a house – and Robert’s apartment is underground.)

Later our friend emailed photos and more details of the patio being built behind the house and the landscaping to be finished this summer. We are overwhelmed by our friends’ generosity and God’s providence:

“Garden beds and coop will be empty and available. If you want to keep chickens there, we can arrange to get you some new ones. There's running water and electric power back here. Wood shed is full of 1 cord of wood for use in fireplaces next winter.

“Land on the left side of the road is also part of the property and could be used for planting if desired. We had great plans for it, but haven't gotten to them. The big purple thing is a plumb tree that produces crazy numbers of plumbs ever since I thinned out the trees to give it light.

“Here's the raspberry bushes, blueberries and cherry tree. All producing now. More raspberries than we can eat.”

We left and I praised and thanked God the rest of the day.

All we need is a cave of love, right? In rags or riches, we are vowing to spend the rest of our lives together committed to each other and to God Almighty. That’s all we need. Yet God knows what our other temporal needs are too, and the plans He has for us. Build us up, Lord, in your love. Build a fire in us that will dance and glow into eternity.

Proverbs 31:25 in describing the ideal wife says, "She is clothed with strength and dignity and laughs at the days to come.”

I have been laughing a lot the past week. I can’t help it.