Cheers to a couple as normal as any other

Just another ordinary Monday, I went to pick up Aidan after work. I don’t usually wear the star and uniform and gear home, but my husband Brian was on tour, and I was running late. I got out of the car, and I saw a guy with a dark mask running through the school parking lot, scaring the heck out of the kindergartners. I used the big cop voice: “STOP” and then gave chase. Officer Ahern from Ingleside swooped in at the same time, and he caught him.

The guy’s excuse was that he had used the wrong drugs that day.

This was not “Dirty Harry.” This was not “The Streets of San Francisco.” But Sister Lil and Ms. I, the assistant principal, were effusive. Father Agnel went so far as to write, “God sent him to be there at the right time and right place.”

It’s all well and good to have the nuns on my side, but what I really wanted was my son’s approval. I walked up the steps to the library, and Aidan looked up from the iPad, shuffled to the car. As he turned the station from NPR to 99.7 NOW, he asked, “Why were you so late picking me up?”

“Well, I stopped that man who was scaring the students.” “Oh.” “That it?” I asked. “No ‘good job, Daddy’?”

Aidan shrugged again, clearly more interested in his iPad than this conversation.

“OK, if you really want one: good job, Daddy. But you know, this would be a brave thing if you were a mailman. For you this stuff is just … ordinary.”

To him, 25 years as a deputy is just ordinary, but a decade or two before that I would have been considered ineligible.

Brian and I are just an ordinary couple, but 32 years ago we were the first gay men that any of our friends had ever seen get married. We didn’t get any press coverage for inventing gay marriage, because Al Gore hadn’t invented the internet yet. The guy who was president at the time, incidentally the first divorcé to ever hold that office, said that ours was “an alternative lifestyle which I do not believe society can condone.”

We didn’t think we were revolutionaries on Sept. 19, 1987, when the tape deck started playing “Here Comes the Groom.” But 10 years and two days later, the U.S. Congress passed the Defense of Marriage Act, lest we destroy the sacred institution. It had been introduced by Rep. Bob Barr, who was on his third wife at the time.

We were domestically partnered on Sept. 19, 1991, because Brian didn’t want to remember another anniversary date.

We didn’t think we were revolutionaries in 2003, when we applied to become foster parents. California had just recognized samesex couple adoption formally, and it would still be illegal in many states for 13 years. In that time, more than 100,000 other samesex couples would adopt.

Crazy Mike once told me that you can protest in the streets all you want, but what really sells the revolution is when you’re picking out china. No one thinks of us as the samesex, mixedrace, mixedpreference family with rescue dogs on the block, because by the time we did get legally married, on Sept. 19, 2008, (because, again, Brian did not want to remember a new anniversary date), our San Francisco family was practically a cliche.

Most of our neighbors in this cozy, foggy corner of the city think of us as the people who pay a mortgage on the blue bungalow, fight with the school district, take the Kipcap in for a tuneup, take Bandit in to the vet. In short, we lead the most mundane of lives, but just ordinary is a miracle.

And on Sept. 19, I am grateful to my husband for 21 years of illegal, 11 years of legal wedded bliss. Thank you for the 34 Christmas trees, the 35 turkeys (we had an extra Thanksgiving one year), the 21 rescue dogs, the year with the triplets, the years with the two sons. Thank you for gathering those boys together every evening around the dining room table, saying grace and toasting “the best boys in the world, wherever they are.” But on this one night of the year, we go out for dinner, and I toast the “the best husband in the world.”

Our marriage, our family, is just like any other family you might find in the outer, outer, outer, outer Excelsior. Not extraordinary, but extra ordinary.

Brian and I ... 32 years ago were the first gay men that any of our friends had ever seen get married.