Our anniversary plans seem a bit like the Cyclone Ride on Coney Island. Started with a grumpy innkeeper in Massachusetts, veered off into Lyme Disease, headed for Vermont, and now, we are about to board a train for New York City to go see a movie about Hannah Arendt, the great writer and moral philosopher and a scholar of morality and the holocaust. I woke up in the middle of the might and wondered at myself – is this really fun, going to see a movie about morality and the Holocaust on your anniversary?

Sounded a little grim to me, taking oneself too seriously is a sin in my religion.  And definitely an odd anniversary celebration. But I had to laugh, that’s the thing about Maria and I. We woke up laughing, the sun is out in the morning for the first time in weeks,  me teasing her about an interminable dream, we love the train ride down the Hudson into New York, we love trips to just about anywhere together,  I am happy to see my daughter Emma, who is leaving her big-shot baseball blogging job early to join us for the movie and a quick dinner. I am debating, as usual, whether to bring my camera, I am thinking of those shots on the Lower East Side.

This will be a curious anniversary, a memorable one. A sweet one, too, for many reasons. Soon I will be on the train, looking out at the abandoned mansions on the islands of the Hudson, meditating to the sound of the rails,  listening to the new and very innovative Kanye West CD  “Yee-zus” (I love it so far), reading “Translatlantic,” a new novel by Colum McCann. Most of the way, I will be holding the hand of my girl and thanking the world for its many gifts to me, two of which I will be dining with. It will be nice to see Hannah, too, we have been talking to one another for many years.

So yeah, it is a lot of fun, and in its own weird way, the perfect anniversary.