Today is the fifth anniversary of our marriage. According to (Russian?) tradition, it is called "wooden wedding". The first year is called "cotton", the second - "paper", etc.

My husband loves to say that we got married on "Black Tuesday" anniversary. October 29, 1929 was the beginning of the Great Crash and the Great Depression.

My parents have never celebrated their anniversary. I have no idea what date it is. To complicate things further, they were married twice. Such was surrealistic nature of my country's laws... They wanted to join cooperativ - a building society. There were basically two ways people could get a place to live in the USSR. Either to wait until your factory gives you one, in this case you pay nothing, but it could take decades of waiting, or to join a building society. In this case you had to pay certain amount of money for 20 years. Still there were much more people willing to join a building society than were available. My parents only were so lucky because my mother's aunt had an affair with the local Party boss... But let's skip that.

My mother had a house, a shack, she inherited from her grandmother. Somehow this meant she couldn't join a building society -- don't ask me why, I have no idea. Yet in the case my parents were divorced, my father would officially have no place to live, so he was eligible for joining damn cooperativ. So they decided to divorce.

When you have a three years old kid, you better come up with a good reason for a divorce, otherwise the court would torment you with attempts to reconcile forever. My mother went to a lawyer, and they found the best reason, and a very believable one: drinking.

Later my mother told me how it was:

"Do you drink?" -- asked a woman judge strictly.

"I do" -- confirmed my father despondently and sighed guilty.

They agreed to leave the court building walking on the opposite sides of the street -- just in case.

They lived unmarried for 10 or more years since then, because there was no particular reason to marry again. Then they did get married, but this event was so ordinary, I have no memory of it.

Why I am writing all this... If I were American, I would vote "No" on measure 36. It is anti-human to refuse our gay brothers and sisters the right to abuse our sacred institute of marriage the rest of us enjoy so much.