***

I’ve been working on a story for the Chronicle about the resurgence of speakeasies in the city — not legitimate, backroom, underground speakeasies, but rather places that make you whisper a password through an intercom before you’re allowed inside to drink or, in some cases, dance.

It’s probably against the old-timey speakeasy code to dance in such an establishment, considering the loud thumping and hey-Mr.-DJness of it all would attract a modern day, axe-wielding Elliot Ness and his trusty sidekick, Sean Connery, but this particular place offers a giant slide at the entrance, and as an at-home dad I can forgive a boatload of historical inaccuracies if there are giant slides involved.

It’s been a thrill to explore some of these places, and because there’s no one else to watch Emmeline during the day, I brought her along for the ride — a history lesson of her city. I wrote P-R-E-S-S on a little piece of paper and stuck it in her hat. She ate it.

Standing before a thick oak door studded with iron bolts, I told her about the giant slide behind it and then knocked a few times, hoping to interview the owner while Emme contented herself on the slide. No luck. It was closed.

I showed her the mammoth hotel around the corner where, almost a century ago now, a speakeasy was hidden between the floors. Though it wasn’t a speakeasy, I took her to one of Dashiell Hammett’s offices in a building the kindly guard said was Art Deco but was really Art Nouveau, hoping to at least get our minds accustomed to the general era.

And then I took her to my favorite place in the Tenderloin — the place where, on a different day and without Emme, I had gulped down the best martini I’ve ever had and watched as the waitress tipped a book on a dusty shelf and pushed aside a hidden door to reveal a darkened, tin-roof cocktail golconda.

“Oh no!” I told Emme, after trying the door and ringing the buzzer, “It’s locked! I should really call these places first, huh kid?”

We stood on the corner for a moment, waiting for the door to miraculously open or the owner to arrive, and I passed the time by pointing out the drug dealers on the street.

“See?” I whispered, “This guy takes the cash, and then, over there across the street on that corner. See? He gives out the drugs. This is more socio-economics than history, I suppose. But still, don’t tell your mother.”

Emme burped up tiny pieces of her press pass.

***

On a tour yesterday of yet. another. preschool, the director mentioned something about daddy work day when dads come in and share with the class what they do. Bankers, lawyers, doctors — I imagined dads traipsing through classes with feverish, pitched tales of high finance, hostile takeovers and runaway aortas.

For the first time in my year and a few months as a stay-at-home dad, I was scared. Sitting there, trying to think of just what on earth I would say to a roomful of 2-3-4- and 5-year-olds about what it is I do all day long, I froze. Sweat formed on my brow. My fingers wrestled with each other.

I imagined waiting in tiny chairs outside a classroom, my speaking slot wedged between a host of important, well-dressed professionals, as I fumbled with note cards and listened as Emme introduced me.

“My dad takes me to speakeasies and schools me on the finer points of the inner-city drug trade. Here he is. My Dad.”

***

***

I was standing on a newspaper in the bathroom. Dana stood behind me. Her fingers traced my bare shoulders. Ran down my back. Tickled my sides.

“Just hold still,” she ordered. “Sheesh.”

“Then stop tickling me!”

Emmeline cowered at our feet, poking between Dana’s legs to watch — to see just what the hell her parents were up to in the quiet of the early morning.

“You know,” I said, “Our anniversary is coming up. It’s times like these that make me glad you said yes.”

“Because this is everything I imagined it would be. Turn please.”

“You missed some — there, in the middle.”

Dana sighed.

“It’s times like these I wonder why I did.”

“Twice,” I reminded her.

***

The first time Dana and I got married, we were crammed into a dusty office on the island of Santorini, Greece. It was dark, cramped, sweaty — not the location typically highlighted in wedding brochures. The office was on the bottom floor of a two-story white plaster building. Azaleas crawled over the windows. Donkeys loitered outside.

“We must hurry,” said Markos, our wedding coordinator and unofficial mayor of Oia — a quaint, carless, cliffside town on the tip of the crescent-shaped island in the middle of the Aegean Sea.

The day after we arrived in Santorini, Markos hustled us from our white-washed hillside hotel room and rushed us to the city offices.

“City hall, yes?” he said. “We must hurry before it closes. Just sign a few things, sign yes?”

“Yes.”

“We must sign things and then we can have the ceremony in a few days.”

We ducked into the cramped office. A clerk opened a thick leather binder and flipped through the thin pages. Dust curled in the air.

“Sign,” she said, pointing at a blank page, “Sign.”

Dana signed the book. I followed. The clerk smiled, and Markos clapped his hands.

“Congratulations!” he said. “You are now officially married.”

He pronounced it “Mary Ed.”

I was wearing Teva sandals. Dana wore a baseball cap. I never thought much, growing up, about where or how I would be married — just that I only wanted to do it once and with the person I couldn’t live without.

Dana and I shrugged, laughed and then leaned over the binder and kissed. Markos clapped again. The clerk sneezed and filed the binder away. It was all very romantic.

***

Our second wedding was three days later on a whisper of an island located just off the town’s steep cliffs. It was the wedding we signed up for — the wedding we flew 12 hours for and forced almost 30 guests to do the same.

Off the northern tip of Santorini, separated by a thin band of roiling turqoise, the island of St. Nikolas rose sharply from the water with a rocky spire. A white plaster church huddled amid the shoals. There was a round, rocky platform where Dana and I stood and tried not to laugh too hard as Markos mangled the 10-page script I had written for the ceremony.

“Do you Mikhail take Donna to be Mary Ed?” he asked, as Dana bit her lip and pinched my hands with her fingers.

“Who’s this Ed guy?” I whispered.

Dana managed to hold it together when she read her vows. Three years later I have yet to watch our wedding video because I’m frightened of looking at the blubbering puddle I became.

After the waterworks stopped, we took a boat back to the main island and road donkeys through town. Our guests followed with torches, because in Greece nothing says matrimony like a lynch mob.

We parked our asses outside an open air restaurant and celebrated for hours under the ancient stars. We fed each other honeyed almonds. We ate, gave speeches. We cleared chairs and tables and danced to the thin, tin-horn sounds of a borrowed boombox. We held hands and walked home alone on a dusty path, moonlight guiding our steps. It was perfect — everything we imagined it would be.

***

For my birthday last week, Dana’s dad came to watch Emmeline, while Dana loaded me in the car and said, “So, what do you want to do today?”

“The whole day?”

“Yup, just us.”

For the first time in I can’t-remember-how-long, my wife and I explored the city alone. We went to the Palace of the Legion of Honor first and fell in love with Henry Moore.

“I want one,” Dana sighed, tracing a sketch with her finger. “I want them all.”

We studied the Rodin gallery and briefly thought about eating a Thiebaud from a new exhibit.

Afterward we lounged over thin crust pizzas at a place in the Sunset we never have time to visit anymore. We even managed to take in a movie. At one point I was literally sitting on the edge of my seat. Dana laughed and poked my ribs.

“This was perfect,” I told her as we walked out of the theater. “Just a perfect day.”

***

Standing on the newspaper in the bathroom, watching thin hairs flutter to the ground and laughing as Emme hid behind Dana’s legs, I turned to watch Dana in the mirror. She was focused on my back. Then she poked my ribs.

“Stop moving!” she laughed.

“Well stop poking me!”

Our shrieks and the hum of the electric razor forced Emme from the room. She had enough.

“Bright girl,” Dana said.

“Oh it’s not that bad.”

I caught Dana’s smile in the mirror, and I began to think about our two weddings — the perfect one and the unplanned one, and three years later I wasn’t sure any more which was perfect and which was, by default, less so.

And then I thought about all the days between then and now and looking back, they seemed to blur together until I couldn’t tell them apart either. Growing up, I used to think I only wanted to get married once. Then I realized if you’re lucky enough to find someone who makes each moment feel more perfect than the last — whether you’re kissing over a dusty binder in a cramped office, holding hands in a museum or standing on a newspaper in the bathroom and getting your back shaved and your ribs poked — you’d marry her as many times as she’d agree to it.
“I honestly don’t know what I was thinking,” Dana smiled, tickling my side.

“Twice,” I reminded her.