We’re Saving This Bottle of Fine Wine for a “Special Occasion”

Which may be one of our funerals, the way we’re going.

Have you heard about the “specialness spiral?” I learned about it just recently. It describes how an item can become so “special” that we fail to use it at all because every occasion doesn’t seem “special enough.” I’m trying to get over that.

It started after a visit to my sister’s house. I noticed that my sister was using our grandmother’s fine porcelain china, the china that had always been kept in a cabinet and used only for “special occasions.”

“Hey, no need to break out the fine china for us,” I told her, looking to our other sibling for confirmation. “We can use paper plates.”

“Why not?” she replied. “What am I saving them for?”

She was right. What were we saving the fine china for? What are we saving many things for?

My husband and I have this bottle of wine. It’s a Chateauneuf-du-Pape. He purchased it on his bicycling trip through Europe in 1988, swearing that he would open it when he found the woman of his dreams.

I thought that woman was me because we met in 1989 and married a year later.

We didn’t open it on our engagement. We were too busy doing (ahem) other things. He decided we’d open it on our wedding day. Already liquored up from the reception, we decided the bottle was too “special” to waste on our already numb palettes. Ditto on the honeymoon.

“Special occasions” came and went. Our first apartment, our first home, our firstborn, our second born.

We took the bottle with us when I managed to sneak away with him on one of his business trips to Hawaii. The bottle came back with us, unopened, five days later.

Milestone anniversaries came and went. Our children’s graduations from high school. Our son’s acceptance into the Marines and graduation from boot camp. Our daughter’s college graduation. Our son’s marriage and the birth of his two children. Our 50th birthdays. Our retirements. The Seattle Seahawks won the Super Bowl one year, and, STILL, we didn’t open that bottle.

Three years ago, we did a major remodel of the house in which my husband and I have lived for 33 years. When it was all done, I moved the china and crystal out of the boxes in the attic and into the new glass kitchen cabinets I had selected. Now we use the china as our “everyday” tableware.

The bottle, however, has entered the “specialness spiral” with no “grand opening” in sight.

We still have a few opportunities ahead of us: Our daughter’s wedding (provided she finds “Mr. Right”), her children (more grandchildren are always appreciated), our 75th birthdays, and, if we’re lucky, our 50th wedding anniversary.

Or maybe it will be nothing at all, and we’ll open it “just because.” I think that might be best.

But I promise you this: If my husband passes first, and that bottle is still unopened, I’m going to use it to christen his coffin as it’s lowered into the ground!