Not just business as usual, and that’s not bad

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In a typical year, Jessica and I would have likely been occupying a couple of seats at a most-favored Mexican restaurant in the early evening of April 8th, dipping chips into salsa, and celebrating our wedding anniversary.

But Mick Jagger said you can’t always get what you want, and Mick — who once also informed us on the elusiveness of satisfaction — was right, especially in an atypical year.

With no sit-down Mexican restaurant option available (for reasons you know too well), Jessica and I initiated Plan B, celebrating our third anniversary at the same location where we’ve been doing most everything lately: home. Having to alter our normal plans for this anniversary seemed, after I did a little research on wedding anniversaries, an especially appropriate way to mark our third, which is celebrated traditionally with the exchange of gifts made from leather. Online sources say leather signifies a marriage’s “flexible durability,” and flexible durability, I think, is a good motto for this unusual year, which has seen the sudden upheaval of most all of our norms, requiring everyone adjust, adapt and recalibrate.

But here I must pivot back for a moment to the wisdom of The Rolling Stones and “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.” Mick follows that lyrical truth with this: “If you try sometimes, you just might find, you get what you need,” and I suppose Mick is right about that, too.

Even if you don’t know you need it.

That was the case four days after Jessica and I had improvised our at-home anniversary, when the calendar had moved forward from our special date and on to another one: April 12, Easter Sunday.

The holiday, like our anniversary, required some creativity of those seeking to celebrate in this non-conforming year.

Near and far, churches found unique ways to mark the occasion, while maintaining safe social distancing; and though I wasn’t planning any at-home Easter observance, a holiday-ish thing happened and I found myself engaged for nearly half an hour in what felt like an impromptu Easter event.

I was about 10 minutes into what I’d planned to be a quick DIY project in our back yard when — long story short — I accidentally dropped my socket wrench set from atop the ladder on which I was standing, the sockets falling several feet to the earthen ground below and scattering like shot.

But I was in the middle of a task, so for the moment kept doing what I’d been doing, only pausing to summarily assess the situation with the sockets below.

They would, I assumed from my lofty position on the ladder, be easy to find and gather. Looking back, I’m not sure where that optimism originated, though the first few sockets, because they’d not scattered far from their upturned case, were easy to spot.

But a dozen or so more remained scattered, lost and hidden on the ground amongst the pine straw, pine cones, leaves, limbs and dirt.

Though it wasn’t on my to-do list, what I faced on that fine morning was a hunt.

And though it was small metal sockets I sought instead of candy eggs, the principles remained the same.

I trained my eye for shiny objects mingling with the earth tones, and that helped me recover a few more of the missing sockets.

The going was slow, but this being the only socket set I own and a tool I use for many jobs, I wasn’t giving up, determined to conquer this uniquely-stylized “Easter egg” hunt.

As my search slowly continued — there’s another one! — and the sockets I’d retrieved outnumbered those still missing, they became increasingly harder to spot.

My excitement grew every time I spied another.

The last two sockets — you can guess they were the smallest sizes, and you’d be right — were the most difficult and time-consuming to locate. I’d expanded the scope of my search, widening the perimeter, fanning farther than my calculations initially informed me I had to look.

After a few minutes more stooping and searching, I located the last holdout, which was shiny and obvious once I’d spotted it, though the little object had been frustratingly elusive for the many minutes I’d spent searching for it. The elation I felt returning that last missing socket to its proper place was magnificent.

I might have wanted a Mexican meal on the 8th, or an aggravation-free DIY job without the sideshow of a socket search on the 12th, but what I got was something else.

Was it, per Mick Jagger’s wisdom, what I needed?

Well, I can’t honestly say I remember what Jessica and I did to celebrate our second wedding anniversary, or even our first. And Easter 2019? Or 2018? Or practically any other Easter in the last decades? Those are memories I’ll never retrieve.

But I won’t, I’m certain, forget how I marked those milestones during this anomaly of a year.

Maybe what I needed was what I got: A greater appreciation for the things that, in a normal year, I would have considered just another part of the routine.