Page 386 - WhyAsInY

Why (as in yaverbaum)
To return to a somewhat weightier topic: In 1976, I threw a surprise thirtieth-birthday party for Phyllis in Michael and Susan’s home in Rye Brook, New York. Three years later, we threw a large party in our own home, complete with jukebox, to celebrate our tenth anniversary. We threw a much larger party, a black-tie reception, on the occasion of Danny’s bar mitzvah in November 1983 in Temple Israel Center of White Plains. Finally, Phyllis threw a huge surprise fortieth-birthday party for me in November 1984 in the Dreamwold Inn, a restaurant in Carmel, New York. That was six months before we separated.
And those are the high points. As I said, the rest, with the exception of the aftermath of January 29, 1983, is essentially a blur. With a few trivial exceptions and snapshots of essentially undatable moments that emerge for some reason from a corner of my memory, that’s about it.
To take one glaring example of my inability to recapture key events: I stated on the “resume” that “Phyllis and I separated for a two-week period in late 1977.” But I remember nothing significant about it: not the problems, not the conversations, not any precipitating events, not even how we got together again. I just recall that I rented a car, that I lived with Dave and Ellen Abramson in Rockland County for two weeks, and that I managed to get to work and do my job during that period. I also know that Phyllis and I “reconciled” at the time and that at least one wonderful result of our reuniting was our decision to have our third beautiful child soon thereafter. But I don’t recall what led to the reconciliation.
As I play back the movie of our first fourteen years together, the images that remain with me rarely involve just the two of us, and that’s because there rarely were just the two of us.
What do I see besides our dancing at our wedding; our stay at the Plaza; our time in Aruba; the first dinner served after our honeymoon (which ended in a fit of laughter and, ridiculously enough, a bout of reverse peristalsis); the time at which, endeavoring to provide Phyllis with a more comfortable toilet seat, I managed to shatter the entire bowl and thereby create a $300 geyser; a one-hundred-rubber bridge tourna- ment with my cousin Peter and his then wife, Susan; our preparing for
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