![]() ![]() If I were to break up with Leon, I thought to myself at our wedding, I wouldn’t be able to trace it back to this simple, impersonal twenty-minute ceremony we would be worthy of a more complicated narrative. I barely knew the five officemates sitting in the second row, who needed proof that this forty-six-year-old poster child for eternal bachelorhood was indeed getting married. We married on Leon’s lunch break, since he worked two blocks from city hall, and a third of our fifteen-person wedding party came uninvited. I didn’t want to provide us with an easy omen, with a sure sign in retrospect. The second time around, there would be no three-tiered cake. As things collapsed definitively, I remembered the cake. Until the final moments of crumbling, we hadn’t even really argued. It included all the hallmarks of a disintegrating marriage-deceit, betrayal, frustrated expectations. There was nothing original about our breakup. In the end, I married a person of my own creation. Smugly, I mocked my friends and thought our love was stronger, more authentic, more lasting than theirs. We fell in love with our respective bookshelves and envisioned a future of merged multilingual libraries. A visiting French graduate student in philosophy, he astounded me with his encyclopedic knowledge and his passion for comparative mythology. I married my first husband when I was under the spell of graduate school, as everybody I knew had paired off and I assumed that nuptials secured a sure path to bona fide adulthood. And now, a toppled wedding cake cemented our union, which so obviously defied convention. Patrick’s Day-a date I chose only because it fit with my graduate school vacation calendar-and a party at my parents’ house the next day. A black dress, no formal invitations, a ceremony at city hall on St. ![]() This was exactly the anti-wedding I’d been hoping for. Instead of interpreting the mangled wedding cake as a questionable omen, I had read it as a sign of exquisite luck. When I opened the door, my father’s guilty eyes peered at me from behind the lopsided cake, whose side had now acquired a permanent dusting of twigs. I couldn’t face a repeat of my first wedding, when my father tripped on his way to the front door and let out a faint squeal as my three-tiered marzipan-covered lemon wedding cake, in slow motion, escaped his grip, slid off its platform and plummeted, left side first, into the grass. The second time I got married, there was no cake. Not only would she come to identify proudly as a birder, but birding would ultimately lead her to find love, uncover a new language and lay down her roots. What Zarankin never could have predicted was that she would become one of them. Recently divorced and auditioning hobbies during a stressful career transition, she stumbled onto birdwatching. The following is excerpted from the memoir Field Notes from an Unintentional Birder, published by Douglas & McIntyre, in which Julia Zarankin finds meaning in midlife through birds. ![]()
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