From puppy love to wedded bliss

Yekaterina Ginzburg-Bram and Mark Bram /Yekaterina Ginzburg-Bram

Weddings are full of beautiful moments: the vows, the flowers, the tears of joy, the first moment alone as a married couple – but for me, the most wonderful moment of all happened long before then.

In retrospect, I should have suspected something when Mark picked me up after school on a bleak December Wednesday, complaining of nerves and insisting on a trip to the pet shop to look at puppies as the only possible cure. Yes, we’d employed this odd form of “animal therapy” before, but now my partner insisted on bringing a video camera to film a golden retriever puppy as “research” for his “artist girlfriend’s” “dog illustrations.”

It’s true, I do doodle goldens in my spare time, but still, I didn’t understand the point of such an elaborate visit – or why the good folks at the pet shop accepted it without question.

As soon as we arrived, we were escorted to a puppy run and introduced to a furry orange toddler hopelessly entangled in his own paws and brimming with boundless goodwill toward humankind.

Mark filmed; I sat on the floor in a joyful doggie-induced trance, so I only vaguely heard my partner inquire about the dog’s name, or the employee’s response of, “It’s printed on his collar.” Still, I looked at the gold heart-shaped tag and found … a date. The current date, in fact, but somehow I missed that.

The pet shop lady then urged me to turn over the tag to read the other side, which said, “Will you marry my friend?”

I should tell you that I understood right then and there. But I didn’t.

“How cute!” I said, and kept on playing.

“Don’t you understand what this means?” my poor beloved asked, producing a ring box and capturing dramatic footage of the pet store wall with his camera. Which was just as well, since the alternative was me – dressed for work and displaying woefully neglected nails – succumbing to a flood of tears on the floor of a puppy run. And, to this day, it’s the single purest, happiest memory of my life.

We still have that dog collar. The folks at the pet shop remembered us for years. We got married in a beautiful ceremony on a stormy November night. Eight years later, we’re still writing our story – the most wonderful love story in the world. And, if nothing else, I’ve learned to look for the romantic, the fairy-tale, the sublime in the most unexpected places. And to keep my nails manicured at all times.

YEKATERINA GINZBURG-BRAM, of Providence, is a member of Temple Emanu-El and an elementary school art teacher in the Providence school system. Mark Bram is a rock musician, Grand Master of the Lee Wah Yook Qi Quan system of Internal Chinese Martial Arts and Sifu in the Yang Style Tai Chi Chuan and the owner of the martial arts school Internal Arts in Pawtucket.