My Wedding Tale

One the best choices I have made in recent years is the decision to regularly see a therapist. When the crazy begins to build up in me, I can diffuse it with a little conversation with someone who is kind and perceptive and, importantly for me, has a sense of humor. These sessions often leave me in a reflective frame of mind, so when my therapist mentioned in parting that he would be attending his son’s wedding, my thoughts went back, back to mine own wedding over fifty years ago.

The year was 1972, the tail end of the hippie era, and I was having my own summer of love. We were not a conventional couple, so, of course, we didn’t want a conventional wedding. We had been swept up in the cultural changes and social conflicts of the time. Before I met Marcia, she had graduated from college as the only student who didn’t wear a cap and gown in a gesture of protest against the Vietnam War, had been arrested and jailed in an anti-war demonstration, had worked in minority voter registration in backwoods Virginia, and was working as a United Farm Workers boycott organizer when, doing the same job, I met her, and we began to date. In high school, I had read Henry David Thoreau and became determined to march to a different drummer, preferably with a hard rock beat.

We wanted an outdoor wedding and learned of man who ran his own botanical garden in Strongsville, Ohio, and who charged the public a small admission fee to tour the extensive, beautifully landscaped grounds where his pet peacocks roamed. He was open to us having a wedding there. As we walked the grounds with him, we began planning the staging of the event. I pointed to knoll across the way and told the owner that we would stand on it as we recited vows.

“I wouldn’t recommend it,” he said with dry humor. “That’s my compost heap and it’s a good part manure.” So we chose a different place and lined up a date, August 12.

That summer we got our first place together, in a rundown apartment complex in downtown Cleveland. The place’s chief advantages were that we could afford the rent, and it was in walking distance of Rainbow Babies and Children’s Hospital where I was working as an orderly to pay my way through school. The apartment complex, though, had several disadvantages. For one thing, there was only a small parking lot attached with no close street parking. Each tenant was assigned one space, and fights arose when a tenant would return to find his or her spot occupied. There was often a cascading effect: you found your spot filled and took another person’s and who in turn took someone else’s. It was up to the super to sort things out and mediate the conflicts so that they didn’t escalate into violence which they often seemed on the verge of doing. The super was a tall, cadaverous-looking white guy. He hated cats and, tenants told me, when he was outside burning trash in the incinerator, if found a stray cat he would toss it into the flames.

Our place wasn’t in the main building, a massive, gloomy brown brick structure. We lived in an apartment in one of the two annexes. Each annex was divided into two apartments. Originally, they had had screened in porches, but to create two apartments in each, the porch was walled up and became the apartment’s bedroom area. That room had no heating, though, so when you slept, you kept the door open to the tiny living room to keep from freezing on chilly nights. The two annexes had the identical layout, so that it was easy for a newcomer to enter the wrong one. In the annex apartment corresponding to ours, there lived a black orderly who looked a bit like Little Richard, the singer. The guy had a very active love life, and he liked tall men who would knock on our door in the middle of the night and look startled when a short, white guy opened the door. Once there was a late-night pounding on the door with an angry lover demanding to be let in and me yelling that he had the wrong place.

My parents were appalled by our place, and my mother was less than happy with our wedding plans. I explained the location and that there would be protest songs and anti-war poetry read. As I described the festivity, I could see her becoming increasingly distressed. Finally, she said, “Well, what are you wearing?”

“Marcia is making me a purple dashiki and I’m wearing white pants,” I replied.

“Where did you get a pair of white pants?” she asks in an accusatory tone. Then I could see a look of growing horror come across her face. “No, Dale, no! You’re not wearing your orderly pants, are you? Oh, no, please!”

“They’re perfectly fine pants, mom.”

“This is going to be a freakish event!” she exclaimed. And she didn’t mean that in good way. “I’m going to be so embarrassed!” she sobbed.

“I am buying new black shoes,” I pointed out. “That’s sorta a compromise with you, isn’t it?” She only cried harder.

Mom, if you’re peering into this blog entry from some celestial plane, I’m sorry for all the aggravation that I put you through in your life, particularly the orderly pants. But, if you have internet access, could you get some of the other spirits to read my blog? An otherwise unexplained knock in the night will be considered a “like.”

The night before the great event, Marcia went back to the house where she had been living with roommates, so she could supervise underage visiting relatives and maintain a semblance of propriety because it was still a big deal back then for a couple to be living in sin. Many landlords would not rent to an unmarried couple.

Larry, my soon-to-be brother-in-law, stayed with me. When we had turned off the lights, there was a pregnant silence. I was on the brink of losing my bachelorhood, although I had not done anything particularly notable with it.

“Nervous?” he asked.

“I feel like a kamikaze pilot the night before being bolted in the cockpit for the last mission,” I said. He laughed. A few months later he himself would get married, unexpectedly.

When I arrived at the botanical garden, the weather, the decorations, and the landscaped setting – all were perfect. But I was seized by anxiety because milling about were my current and future relatives who seemed the very image of bourgeois propriety with a fringe of right-wing political viewpoints added to complete the picture. What in my mind’s imaginings was supposed to be a beautiful, romantic, and inspiring occasion, now seemed to contain the distinct possibility of being, to these onlookers -- well—a freakish event. But there was no ejecting and parachuting to safety now. To mix metaphors, the show must go on.

As matters unfolded, I calmed down. I was marrying the woman that I admired the most, now dressed finely in the gown she had sewn herself. Her minister friend from college was there to conduct the service. My best friend Bruce Simon was there to play the guitar. Marcia’s young cousins were there to sing. They were from Marcia’s late mother’s side of the family – the Flory side. They called themselves The Floryescents and sang the pop star Melanie’s hit song “Lay Down (Candles in the Rain).” Soon I was caught up in the emotion of the lyrics.

We were so close there was no room

We bled inside each other’s wounds

We all had caught the same disease

And we all sang the songs of peace

Some came to sing, some came to pray

Some came to keep the dark away

So raise the candles high ‘cause if you don’t

We could stay black against the sky

Oh oh raise them higher again

And if you do we could stay dry against the rain.

Then an obscure poem was read aloud, something I had found in a book of experimental verse. I don’t remember the author or the title. I just remembered at the time that I loved it, and it was against the war and nuclear power.

After the vows were exchanged and the ceremony complete, no one reproached me, no one raised a critical voice to Marcia or me. We were united in marriage and a mood of happiness and conviviality prevailed. Years later my mother would wonder why she got so upset.

I had one final moment of apprehension as I saw my conservative German grandfather making his way through the crowd toward me. I was sure the weddings most familiar to him involved schnaps, Viennese tortes, and Straussian waltzes. As he approached, the first thing I noticed was the sun shining bright on his mint green tie that stood out against the gray of his suit, his full mustache, his temples and his Fedora. Then I noticed his broad, beaming smile. Then the warmth of his eyes looking at me with affection. With a quick a glance, he appraised me standing there, a child of a culture alien to him, wearing a purple dashiki and white orderly pants – and simply said, “You look good!”

They say love is blind. Sometimes, I think, that’s a blessing.

THE END