Cruise To Norway... a romance of 30 years...

Stephen & I woke quite early together deciding to make a little private adventure of the morning as we cruised into & up the fjord into the home port of the Viking line... & of our ship named Saturn...

We went up to the top deck to the Explorer's Lounge...

  

 

 

The glassed space soaring into panoramic views all 'round.  

Yet offering intimate space for us... 

 

He photographed me...

I  photographed him... 

 

 Our moods contained bits of a secret: we had become 'engaged' just a week before we flew off to London at the beginning of this trip; that is, we'd obtained the marriage license from Pierce County... but we'd not found time to get married! This "no big deal" had taken on at least a bit of the deal we'd wished to circumvent! 

 

Long ago, during the years when I was making wedding rings... I would be amused by the couple's statements of keeping their plans simple, while my experience could predict complications.

  

That is why I can legitimately tell stories about wedding rings becoming operas!    

 

Ultimately, our story became more a sort of a good rehearsal... another valuable teach/learning inside our loving. Still we began to note certain changes of surprisingly subtle nuance... little by yet smaller.  Approaching the fine level of becoming Sacramental, perhaps...

 

Reckoning after the travel, we realized the license had a deadline... our days were numbered.  

 

Stephen has a friend, Bill Hulseman, whose vocation is to help develop & design ritual for such occasions. I appreciated meeting him to further think about the event. Since our friends, another gay couple, for whose wedding we were the witnesses, were unavailable to attend & complete some reciprocal symmetry, we chose two other deep friends: Taylor, our dear Vashon Island neighbor & co-confidant; as well as GRB Bells' upcoming proprietor & best friend, Monica Street, joined our rather spontaneous process... at the exact hour of the autumnal equinox... balancing the celebration on our balcony, with its backdrop of Commencement Bay & our Mother Mountain Tahoma... witness to our vows. (The state requires two witnesses.) As the ink dried on the documents, we toasted with champagne... plus a cake which Bill had made for us... we can certainly wholeheartedly recommend his skills in his vocational choice! 

 We are gaily legitimately married as a gay couple! 

  

Now... the conundrum of the limited kinks of English. My feminist fairly bristles in anticipation of the ambiguities of current permutations... Radical Faeries have long played inventively with campy genderfuck verbiage... that's also long been gay bar-talk. My pragmatist curtsies while asking my inner dyke to dance. 

We are initially trying on being husbands. [My chance, as a proud sissy, to be butch?]
More will evolve, I trust... 

 

 

But I began this post on that upper deck cruising into a Norwegian fjord... 

My first time to this country. 

I am declaring my love for who I call... my sweetman.

Full of visions we can share into beyond...

We fit. So I share one of my appreciations of another, more mundane piece of infrastructure on our ship... craftsmanship in a lattice of local wood, fitted to seafaring geometry... satisfaction!