Second Time Around

Just after Christmas, my best friend received a beautiful wooden box. Inset on the lid was a little metal plaque with 25 hash marks embossed onto it. And when you slid the lid off, resting inside on a bed of soft green material was--a chunk of asphalt.

This is no ordinary asphalt. This is well-traveled asphalt, but not in the sense that many people have traveled over it. No, this particular piece of asphalt has itself traveled near and far. It all started one day when a couple of young men were in a parking lot, and saw a chunk of asphalt lying there, disconnected from the lot. For whatever reason (do you really need a reason when you're a male in your early twenties?) they picked it up and put it in the car and took it away. And thence began its odyssey. That asphalt turned up all over the place. There were a little over a dozen of us friends who tended to hang out together, mostly from our church, and any one of us were liable to suddenly find this asphalt one day among our belongings, especially those who were away at college, without it being clear how it appeared there. It even showed up in the freezer of a frat house at Northwestern University.

At some point, of course, we all starting getting married, and sometimes to each other. I don't remember exactly when the asphalt started showing up as an honored wedding guest, but it started a new tradition, being passed along from one freshly married couple to the next. And it soon acquired a shiny coat of resin, and then a plaque at the top which read "The Guilty Parties", and a small plaque for each couple listing their first names and the wedding date. By the time Stu and I got married, one of the name plates from the top row was gone, victim of a marriage which did not survive. The good news is that all these years later, only two plaques are missing. The holes they leave are testaments to sadness, but the many remaining are equally testaments to joy.

And so now the asphalt is on its second time around. The hash marks on the lid of the box stand for years, and my friends received it a little while after their 25th anniversary, to keep until the next 25th anniversary comes around, at which time they'll send it on to the next honored couple. We won't receive it again until 2012, and I just pray that there are no more missing name plates by then. That chunk of ordinary road material has great sentimental meaning, a celebration of ordinary people who have achieved hundreds of years, between us all, of marital steadfastness, and many more years than that of friendship. I'll only possess it for a week in 2012, before it moves on to the ones who got married just seven days after we did, but I'll cherish that week as a reminder of love and connection and youthful silliness.

Love, Spud.