Before Christmas break, Pulao and I bought some sale rice. The first time we had it, Pulao said it tasted bad. “It’s a little bitter,” she said. Ha! I scoffed. It tasted fine to me. We ate it again. “I don’t like this rice,” she said. The Princess and the pea, I thought. After the second time, Pulao bought some new rice, but I didn’t throw out the old. It’s fine!

Then we came back after ten days holiday vacation to find that our glass rice jar with the old rice, sealed tight, had six to seven buggy things in it. Kind of like little moths, or little cockroaches. Trapped in the jar, they seemed to be mostly dead. There was webby mossy stuff trailing from rice to bugs, and two bugs appeared to be joined at the butt. Went out with a bang, I guess. These bugs had time enough to be born, go through an awkward adolescence, hook up, and die – all while living inside our sale rice.

Pulao is classy, I’ve decided. With a true discerning taste. She is now also my official food taster, who I have asked to vet all my meals and drinks for twinges of buggy bitterness, so I will, in the future, not happily eat thousands and thousands of weevil larva.

Not that we’ve been married 8 years, just that we were married twice. Three times, actually. To each other. Not that we were divorced.

Hmmm . . .

It’s really very simple. It was important to my parents and grandmother that Maddy and I be married in the Catholic Church. Sure, we said. We weren’t any more Catholic than anybody else (and very much less Catholic than Catholics), but we were flexible.

The priest was flexible, too, but not that flexible. “Will you promise to raise your children in the Catholic faith?” Not so much, we said. Maybe, but probably not. Wouldn’t care to wager much on it.

So my parents’ priest said he would bless the marriage. But we needed a marriage to bless first. So we got pre-married at the county courthouse.

Then the Catholic marriage. And later, in India, a Hindu wedding with Maddy’s family. This one also somewhat religiously abridged, this time because we had lived together first (but we were already married! we thought).

We like celebrations and presents (who doesn’t?). Throw in our dating anniversary, three wedding anniversaries, Valentine’s Day, our birthdays, Christmas, Flag Day, 4th of July and Indian Independence Day, and we pretty much stay in celebration mode all the time (except for April, for some reason, unless you count my sister in Ohio’s birthday . . .).

Happy anniversary, Maddy.

(I was soooo kidding about Flag Day).