I have also noticed that Anneliese is sneaking boxes of cookbooks into the house. Deeply troubling, as now the unmade recipe count is almost certainly nudging five figures and rising. This is clearly reckless behavior, and was not addressed in the PREPARE sessions. Then again, I have also noticed that she frequently opens a cookbook, says, “This looks good,” and makes it. No dithering. I come home to notes that say, Hay comida en la estufa, and sure enough it is.
As the wedding draws near, I get a lot of nudges and elbows and raised eyebrows. Especially at the fire department meeting. “Sooo…! How y’holdin’ up? Getcha some socks for those cold feet?” That sort of thing. But I couldn’t be more relaxed. I am simply easy with the idea that this is right. I don’t see any other way to handle it than to go in whole hog, whole heart. Not that you’ll find that embroidered on a pillow any time soon.
But I’m good. I’m happy. Ain’t skeered.
I mean, I do worry some, sure. I worry because I know the future is ruled by chaos. Never mind the seven-year itch, I’ve recently had married friends divorce after two decades together. I worry because lately one of my favorite albums—check that, our favorite album, the one Anneliese and I most enjoy playing while we are cooking—is Greg Brown’s Covenant. These are songs of steady love, of enduring love, these are songs about two people providing each other timeworn comfort. These are songs about a man desiring his wife in her raggedyass old cotton nightgown. And they are sung by a man headed into his third marriage.
Ach, the future. All I know is what I feel now. I feel like a boy who dreamed he could fly. Then he woke up. And he could still fly.
When my friends Tyler and Jenny got married, they did the ceremony bare bones in a park with two witnesses, and then spent their honeymoon driving around the country visiting the friends they would have invited had they held a standard ceremony. I still remember celebrating their marriage over coffee on my front porch in the morning sun before they drove on, and I’m not sure there’s a better way. In this regard, Anneliese and I are going the more standard route. There are relatives coming from as far away as California and Texas, and Anneliese has friends coming from Mexico. My English friend Tim will make a three-day transatlantic flyer just to be here, Bill and Wilda are coming from just outside Nashville, and my friend Gene and his family are driving from Nebraska, reconfiguring their entire summer vacation to include us. We haven’t seen some of them for years, and since many of them will be staying through Sunday afternoon, we don’t want to blow town Saturday night and lose precious visiting time. So we are planning to stay in the area after the reception and then rejoin some of them on Sunday. We’ve been trying to decide where to stay that night, and have dithered. We’re both cheap, and Anneliese has made it clear we can go the economy route—after all, why splash out for some suite when you’re going to arrive tired at 2 A.M., then rise early to catch friends before they hit the road in the morning—but I’m feeling a little pressure here simply as a guy wanting to do right for his girl. Today Anneliese just up and said, “Why not sleep in the back of the International?”
That pretty much salts it.
Three days from the altar, and we have a problem. Because of the indispensable role our friend Minister Katrina played in Anneliese’s life long before I made the scene, I happily agreed when Anneliese suggested that Katrina perform our wedding ceremony. Today we have discovered that unbeknownst to Katrina, she has been dropped from the rolls of her church. The story is convoluted and appears to involve venal underhandedness, but in short, her paperwork was pulled over the fact that—I’m paraphrasing Lenny Bruce here—That Mrs. Johnson, boy, she can throw a baseball just like a man. T-minus seventy-two hours and we are short one sanctioned officiant. I didn’t expect Anneliese to panic, but I was still pleasantly nonplussed when she said, “We’ll figure something out.” For the umpteenth time, I thought, Son, you got lucky. Two minutes later, I was struck with a solution, albeit something other than standard. When I proposed it to Anneliese and she grinned, I thought, Seriously, son: L-U-C-K-Y.
Then I telephoned my friend Bob. The same Bob who all those months ago took my call from the parking garage and assured me Anneliese was wonderful and sane.
“Bob. I’ve got a strange request.”
“Delightful!” Bob has a bit of a flair.
I gave him the details. Asked if he could help us out.
“Oh,” he said. “I would be honored.” I was caught off guard by the softness in his voice, which had shifted from camp to heartfelt in an instant.
Two days out now, and this morning I went to see Dan at the Wig-Wam, for one last haircut. It’s been a while since I’ve done more than wave at him. Having Anneliese cut my hair has become one of my favorite little elements of couplehood. I like to sit there quietly while she runs the clippers around my head. The clippers make an annoying clackety-buzz, and I suppose Anneliese uses the time to acquaint herself with newly revealed areas of my scalp, but her tending to me like this seems ceremonial and makes me feel blessed. Perhaps this is why chimpanzees sit still quietly while other chimps pick their nits. But with Anneliese preparing for the wedding, it seemed best to see Dan one more time. We had a nice visit. I updated him on my International and he took me up the street to look at his Scout, repaired and repainted and back on the road. Then I drove to the Minneapolis airport to meet my buddy Tim.
I first met Tim in the village of Great Wyrley, England, on a summer evening in 1984. He didn’t say much, as his front teeth had been knocked out in a pub fight the previous evening. We wound up hanging out for hours a day not saying a word, and have been fast friends since, visiting each other seven or eight times over twenty years. The first time he came to America, I was in one of those stages where I had nothing to drive but the International. We hammered all over the place. My brother John took him out shining deer, and I taught him to shoot a rifle. My grandpa took him fishing. I have a snapshot from that visit, he and I leaned against the truck bed, I with a holstered pistol, he with a rifle across his chest. He is wearing a hat John fashioned from a skunk pelt. When we weren’t running, we hung out at my apartment, often going for hours without talking. It is an easy friendship.
Five years have passed since we saw each other last, but I spot him at baggage claim immediately. Back in 1984, I was transitioning from feathered look to spritzed mullet, and Tim was stacking his hair high in a modified Thompson Twins mop. Now his hair is going gray and mine is just going. We are both showing some wear. Lines in the face, fewer sharp edges. But our common history keeps us young. He grabs his bag and picks his way through the crowd and says, “O’rright, mate?” as if we were meeting at the pub the same as every Thursday twenty years ago. All this way just to see me married, and in the car I am overfull with gratitude, so full I try to express it. He grimaces and looks out the passenger window, and mumbles, “No worries, mate, no worries.” A two-hour drive home and we don’t say much more.
Back in New Auburn, he grins to see the International refurbished. We load it with food, thermoses, and bedrolls and drive out into the country, deep into a heavily wooded forty well off the road. Parking at the end of the two-track, we hike deeper in, to this little shack I have. Out here you rarely hear so much as a distant engine. This is my stag party: two old friends, talking some, catching up, but mostly just sitting quiet beneath stars that wrap all the way around the world. We wake to sun and birdsong coming through the shack screens and walk out to the truck. We have to get started on the trip to the farm in Fall Creek. It’s going to take longer today, because we’re driving down in the International, and due to the sketchy state of the brake and turn signals, we’re sticking to back roads wherever we can. We run a long stretch of County Highway F, all rolling farmland and silos and red barns. Downhill we roar, uphill we chug. Even if we were prone to chatter, the cab noise mostly precludes it. We grin now and then, but mostly we just look out the windows and watch the country go by. I downshift to third to make the last long pull up the hill t
o the Fall Creek farm, and when we top out and break through the trees the first thing I see is how Anneliese’s mother and stepfather have the place mowed and painted and generally straightened. A tremendous amount of toil. I feel full in my chest, and my eyes moisten. I guess there’s gonna be a lot of that.
With all the friends and relatives coming in from so far away tonight, we have decided to forego a rehearsal dinner and instead have a potluck and outdoor dance at the farm. We have a rented tent set up over folding tables and chairs under the big old white pine overlooking the valley, and at supper time, people start showing up with a dish to pass. I cannot and do not like to dance, but tonight I am in good hands, because we have hired oddly named band Duck for the Oyster, a four-piece acoustic group that comes complete with Karen the folk dance caller. A pint-sized woman with an encyclopedic repertoire and a willingness to lead, she has us weaving and snaking around the hilltop, one new dance after the other, from old pioneer reels to Guatemalan traditionals. Honestly, anybody can do it, and everybody does, from Amy to Grandma. Only once do I go into the tent to flop in a folding chair for a break. I hold Anneliese on my lap and what we see is our longtime loved ones, our new families, and our good old friends, everybody swinging and bowing and do-si-doing on this hilltop in the late summer evening, the angling golden light perfectly matched to the mellow, woody fiddle. Anneliese stands and draws me by the hand and we get back out there and dance until the dew is down and the sun is gone, leaving the night young enough so that everyone may take to bed and be rested for the morning.
I bought a suit and tie previous to the wedding, which seemed to be not an issue of caving in but a simple matter of respect. Anneliese has mitigated my discomfort by allowing me to accessorize with steel-toed boots—the same pair I wore on our first date. We are to be married at mid-morning. Already Tim and Grant and I have set up the folding chairs and taken them back down because a light rain is falling. Grant had mowed a natural amphitheater halfway down the hillside, but now we’re moving operations back up the hill into the tent. I split for the shower.
There is a little room atop the garage overlooking the yard, and it is there I go to dress. John and Jed join me while I’m knotting my tie, and I do my best to avoid saying anything maudlin, as I have given them enough reason for discomfort over the years as it is. We just sit and shoot the breeze and watch the folding chairs filling, slowly at first, then quickly, and then it is time for a grin, a handshake, and a see-ya-later. From playing in the dirt to here. Such good men, my brothers. I get a kick out of the idea that they preceded me down the aisle.
And then I am in the quiet house and there is a soft sound in the hall, and Anneliese steps out before me smiling in a grand dress that tumbles all white and brilliant, but it is only her eyes I can see, blue and clear and strong, and then I kiss her—on the lips lightly and quickly, like the little boy who darts in with roses for the beautiful princess and then darts back. Anneliese gives me her hand, the one I have memorized from a thousand miles away, and her three sisters fall in behind us and Amy leads us out the door, across the yard, and within the tent where we stand before a group of people perhaps best summarized as without whom.
We implicate them immediately by asking for their communal blessing. Minister Katrina reads a poem by the Native American elder Oriah Mountain Dreamer and preaches a verse from Isaiah. We give Amy a heart-shaped locket to represent our becoming a family. Friends and relatives come up in turn to read and sing and speak. One by one they take their part, and what I keep thinking is you hope you can live up to the love of people such as these. I know for a fact there are those in the chairs who wish the service were more churchly, because they kindly took the trouble to say so, but to them I can only reply, You, too, brought us to this moment. Besides, I can see cows from here.
Everything is quite nice—smiles and the occasional dewy moment—until I stand to thank all three sets of our parents, and am overcome with weeping. Not the dignified, solitary-tear-down-the-cheek bit, but a full-on snot-snorking hee-haw. I am grateful that these feelings reside within me, but for the love of Pete, I wish they’d just sort of ease out now and then, not slosh over like a kicked bucket. Now I’ll never be able to sit through the wedding video.
Minister Katrina leads us through our vows, and here you are all alone, looking unblinking into the clear eyes of an open soul, promising in this profound present to make your heart available forever. We vow to love and cherish, in good times and in bad, but we also pledge reverence for each other, a word I chose to include specifically based on the example of my father, who has treated my mother exactly so for forty years now. We do not promise to obey, as I simply cannot conjure the circumstance in which Anneliese should be compelled to obey a man whose proudest achievement since high school is the Unified Laundry Theory. Furthermore, left in charge of my own destiny I once wiped my hinder with poison ivy leaves. Reverence, if you really mean it, pretty much handles obey.
My dear friend Gene bears me Anneliese’s ring, and Anneliese receives mine from her sister Marta. Gene is six inches taller than I, and when he wraps me in a hug I put my head against his chest and I will carry that moment everlasting. After we exchange rings, two of Anneliese’s friends from Mexico rope us together in a traditional lazo. As they drape it around us, Annie, the farmwife from down the road where Anneliese used to help make hay, says, “Mercy!”
Then it is over. Minister Katrina pronounces us, we kiss, and Amy leads us out of the tent, scattering flower petals from her white wicker basket. She has a lot of petals, and we don’t really have anywhere to go, so we take a lap around the galvanized stock tank full of ice and beer.
Down at the Masonic Temple the reception kicks off with a family concert. The Temple is one of those classical architectural behemoths run by a dwindling corps of ancient men, but it has a big kitchen in the basement and an intimate auditorium upstairs just perfect for the concert. The stage is draped in a vintage hand-painted backdrop that creates a trompe l’oeil forest.
The concert was a last-minute idea based solely on the availability of the magnificent stage, and we make the best of it. My brother and his barbershop quartet sing their version of “Yes Sir, That’s My Baby.” I get up there with three musician pals and my guitar with the old-school International emblem on it and perform a handful of songs. Two written for Anneliese, one for Amy, one for my sister-in-law Leanne because I know she puts flowers on the grave of my brother’s first wife and she has brought him back to the living, and the last song we sing for the family members who can’t be here, including Sukey and Steve. From Anneliese’s side of the family we have aunts and uncles and nephews singing in quartets, an aunt performing an early Romantic piece by Adolph Adam accompanied by another aunt on bassoon and a cousin on piano, and, in a performance for the ages, Cousin Paul’s bottle band.
When Cousin Paul asked if he could add the bottle band, I figured he’d set up a card table and rap out “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” on six bottles with a spoon and then we’d give him the hook. What we have instead is a windy tour de force featuring somewhere in the neighborhood of twenty-five family members, seventy-nine bottles, one kazoo, costume changes, and a series of sight gags involving the body parts of department-store mannequins. Cousin Paul directs the orchestra in tails using a genuine cork-handled baton. The cumulative sound is a swelling, room-filling combination of calliope meets tuba. Really, you should have heard “Pop Goes the Weasel.”
They pulled all this off with something less than two hours of practice, and as I watched Anneliese’s ninety-three-year-old grandmother adjust her pearls and hoist her bottle for the chorus of “The Beer-Barrel Polka,” three generations of windblown oom-pah behind her, I thought, I hope they can abide me, because I sure like them.
All this while, we had friends working downstairs in the kitchen, rafts of people pitching in. We have hired a local woman to cater—beyond her husband, nearly all of her assistants are our friends, drafted to heat things, do dishes,
and stock the buffet line with everything Anneliese and her mother test-kitchened with the caterer in advance: Mexican wedding cakes, Mexican meatballs in a chipotle sauce, homemade salsa-fied bean dip, salads, platters of fresh fruit. And outside in the parking lot, the dearest group of roughnecks with which I have ever been associated—the New Auburn Area Fire Department—is set up with their barbecue trailer, charcoaling chicken by the bucketful.
We don’t have a head table. I eat my chicken elbow-to-elbow with my old carp-shooting buddy Mills—the funniest man ever to don a pair of plastic hillbilly teeth. He presents me with a carefully wrapped packet of smoked redhorse, and we bore his wife with the same old stories. It’s a cozy little lull. Then the band starts and Anneliese and I begin making the rounds, trying to say hello to as many people as possible. I see faces from my childhood, my neighborhood, my high school, my old jobs, my bike-racing days, my community theater days, my nights at the bar days, on and on, and it is a parallel experience for Anneliese. You begin to realize that no thank-you note is going to cut it, and you hope they see it in your eyes. Lieutenant Pam from the fire department, who came down even though she was walking straight-up stiff from back surgery. Uncle Bill, with his table of homemade wine shipped in from Texas. Uncle Stan, who drove his Freightliner all night long to be here. When we came down to eat, the signs of friends giving their time were everywhere—from the arrangement of the tables to the milk cans filled with native flowers and red sumac to the handcrafted envelope box…we are blessed, blessed.
The reception is at high hubbub when Bob appears at my elbow, raises a conspiratorial eyebrow, and gives a theatrical nod in the direction of the nearest exit. Anneliese locates Marta and Minister Katrina, I round up Gene, and then we all follow Bob upstairs to an anteroom off the hallway, where he reaches within his suitcoat and draws forth a document with such a grand flourish you would expect him to produce the Federalist Papers or a very lacy hanky.
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