Strangers Tend to Tell Me Things

by Amy Dickinson

  Thank you, kind sir. I didn’t have a father in my life. I didn’t have anyone in my corner brave enough to tell me to stop. The only thing I can say in my own favor is that, despite being something of a control freak basket case, I was somehow able to listen. I felt I’d been slapped into consciousness. And right there, I dropped it. I released everything. I can still feel the enormous relief of that moment.

  I have wonderful memories of that first wedding. But I’m also aware of how selfish we must have seemed to plan something so inconvenient for so many people. That’s the sort of choice you make when you’re twenty-five. When you’re that age, you sincerely believe that a wedding really is all about you. Marriage is all about you, but weddings are all about everyone else.

  For my second wedding, I was almost fifty and anticipating blending together a family of five daughters. Because Bruno is one of thirteen children, I would be acquiring literally dozens of in-laws. Both of our mothers were elderly and frail. I harbored no fanciful illusions. The “it’s my day” concept seemed as quaint as the bouquet toss.

  I receive lots of questions from “Ask Amy” readers about weddings. Although I sincerely believe that the rules of etiquette exist in order for all of us to share our space respectfully, too many people seem to use formal etiquette rules to control, scold, and shame other people. And really, who gives a fig about how an invitation envelope is addressed? What’s inside is what’s important.

  For my wedding to Bruno, I decided to avoid my home church. I have never attended a wedding at the Freeville United Methodist Church (our church, like much else in the village, skews elderly), but I’ve attended far too many funerals there. Thoughts of my dear aunt Lena’s funeral service, just months before, still filled me with a weepy sadness. I did not want to stand at the church’s small altar where so many caskets had been placed. Instead, I called the office of the chapel on the grounds of the George Junior Republic, which is a residence reform school for juvenile offenders two miles from my house. My great-grandfather Calvin Derrick had helped found the school and pioneered its (at the time revolutionary) teaching technique for juveniles, which is focused on self-governance, outdoor exercise, emotional rehabilitation, and education.

  The small, shingled chapel with dark green trim on the school’s campus was built in 1915 and sits on a rise overlooking Freeville. The little Gothic-style building looks like something out of a storybook, like the frontispiece of an illustrated version of “Little Red Riding Hood.” Because Bruno is a Catholic and I’m a Methodist, this nondenominational chapel seemed like liturgical neutral ground for our two families. I had never been to a service there, and unlike the Freeville church, it held no memories of any kind for me. The chapel had an open date in August, and we took it. We would marry in the chapel and have our reception at Bruno’s childhood home, Maryhill Farm, five minutes away.

  Because Bruno and I remained resolute about our plans, all of our daughters eventually calmed down and accepted our marriage as inevitable. We did not insist that anyone else get excited for us or share our bliss—only that they accept it. Bruno and I didn’t discuss our wedding plans with anyone. We decided that if people asked, we would disclose them; otherwise, we would carry on with our work and our lives and quietly handle our wedding ourselves.

  Soon enough, our daughters couldn’t contain their curiosity and started asking about dresses. I had asked all of our daughters to be my “bridesmaids” and told them I’d buy whatever nonmatching dresses they chose. This kept everyone busy, as we spent entire evenings perusing websites and exchanging links and filling virtual shopping carts, only to empty and refill them the next day. There were trips to the giant monster mall in Syracuse, a consumer wasteland so vast and depressing (to me) that I wanted to lie down on the floor and sob myself into a coma. And then the shoes. Did I care about shoes? No, I did not. I still owned only four pairs. But we shopped for shoes and tried on shoes and practice-walked in shoes, and purchased and returned shoes.

  We also talked about hair. My own hair options usually boil down to whether I’ve remembered to brush it that day. But Angela has gorgeous curly Dominican hair, and Avila has beautiful straight Chinese hair, while Clare and Michaela have soft Irish tresses. Emily has my hair—heavy, ponytail hair. How would they wear their hair? I didn’t care. But they did.

  And so we moved on to nails. I don’t hold the universal truth that mani-pedis are a vital prerequisite to a wedding, but my bridesmaids did. So I made an appointment two months in advance for my five bridesmaids to visit a salon on the morning of the big day.

  Most evenings, Bruno and I rode around in his red truck after supper and talked over details. With only two months to plan, we powered through a long list. We met with a caterer. I declared my preference for Methodist chicken barbeque and corn on the cob. Bruno then tossed me off of the catering committee and decided to choose the food himself. We met with my cousin Roger, a Methodist minister who had agreed to travel from his home church near Rochester to perform the ceremony. Bruno seemed to care less about the ceremony, text, and music, and so I tossed him off of that committee and handled that myself. I asked Rachel to assemble the Gene Pool Choir—made up of family members—and I asked my soon-to-be-stepdaughters if they wanted to sing with the group. They said they would sing, and then that they wouldn’t, and then again that they would. Rachel came to our house with her children and mine and force-marched the nine-person choir through several hymns. Some of my girls seemed to be lip-syncing during rehearsals, but that didn’t matter. Made up of loud harmonizers, my clan can override any silence.

  Bruno’s brother Jacques said he would handle the flowers. He decided to use bright-colored zinnias everywhere. He designed special bowls and vases in his pottery studio and planted extra zinnias, timed to bloom in August. I asked Jacques to also do something with corn. By August, the fields around us are lush with it. I freaking love corn, and if we wouldn’t be eating it for our wedding dinner, surely I could welcome some stalks into our chapel.

  Then the rains came. Our part of the world is famous for its extreme and unpredictable weather, but this is most heartbreaking in summertime, which can be either glorious or unbelievably awful. One Fourth of July when Emily was little, we abandoned our optimistic plans for an outdoor picnic and instead spent the day shivering in down jackets as we watched a freezing rain come down in sheets from the shelter of my sister’s porch, while we pathetically waved our sparklers at each other. This year, we had already had a very wet spring. I watched our neighbors plant their corn from their rain-slicked tractors in May, and then the corn grew into seedlings in puddled fields in June. The Dairy Day parade was a soggy mess of sad-looking papier-mâché Holsteins, melted crepe paper–festooned floats, and sopping legionnaires saluting from underneath umbrellas. Sometimes the rain would cease long enough for the fields to dry, and everyone ran out and hastily mowed their shaggy lawns or harvested their early hay. This particular summer, the sun only came out on Tuesdays. Every single weekend was sodden.

  If you want to know the long-term weather prospects for your August wedding, you need to ask a farmer. Every afternoon through June and July, I drove to Fall Creek Farm and loitered at the farm stand, pretending I was carefully considering their vegetable selection while I pumped the proprietors, sisters Kim and Karin Lamott, for weather updates. I had gone to high school with both of them, and I trusted them to give it to me straight. Kim and Karin are locally famous for their sweet corn. They grow it from some sort of miracle seed stock fertilized by the manure of angels and unicorns. The corn these sister-farmers grow is not like the tough, big yellow kernels that offend me from lesser sources. The Lamott “butter and sugar” corn sports small kernels the size of baby teeth, lined up perfectly in alternating colors of white and pale yellow. This corn is sweet as nectar and pops as you scrape it off the cob with your teeth. The sweet juice runs down your chin as you reach for another piece.

  When I asked Karin to prognosticate about that summer’s wea
ther, she would only say, “It’s weird. We get pockets of cloudbursts every day that hit in one part of the field but not another. And the sun only shines reliably on Tuesdays.” Could I somehow arrange to get married on a Tuesday? No, I could not. It rained for seventeen days straight that June. July saw eighteen days of rain. That summer the sandals stayed in the closet; everybody wore Muck boots and shorts. I begged and then cursed the weather gods. Then I gave up thinking about it when I realized I didn’t have a wedding dress.

  I briefly considered wearing my previous wedding dress—a 1920s flapper number I’d found in a consignment shop—but that idea was shot down by my now-vocal bridesmaids. On a blazing Tuesday in late July, I went to New York City for a meeting. I brought Emily with me, because we hadn’t spent much alone time together in several weeks. After a very hot lunch meeting at an outdoor café, Emily and I walked up Madison Avenue to a small dress shop, a place I had been to many times over the years. I remembered that they made one particular frock that I thought could double as a wedding dress. By the time we had trudged twenty blocks on the sizzling pavement, Emily was looking flushed. I was almost violently focused on my dress caper at this point and didn’t pay much attention to what was going on with her.

  By the time we got to the small shop, Emily asked to sit down and was given some water. I was nearly naked behind a curtain with the one available dress halfway over my head when I heard the chair turn over, followed by a loud thump. I peeked out to see my daughter on the floor, out cold. I ran over to her, dress flapping, and called 911 while the clerk tried to zip me up and close the sale.

  By the time the paramedics arrived, Emily had come to but seemed very woozy. The clerk took my credit card and shoved the dress into a bag, and I rode in the ambulance to Lenox Hill Hospital, which turned out to be around the corner. “Dang, we could have walked here,” I whispered to her. Emily looked back at me like she hated me, just a little bit. She was diagnosed with heat stroke and was admitted for several hours while tethered to an IV.

  I called my mother and then Emily’s father, Andy, who held her insurance. I hadn’t seen Andy since Emily’s high school graduation in Chicago, two years before. Although he lived and worked in New York City, he traveled almost constantly, often overseas. Over the years I had come to expect that he was simply not often available in the way that other parents are. As it happened, on this day Andy was in his office, just across town, and he offered to leave work and come to the hospital to see her.

  Andy and I sat, flanking our daughter’s bedside, and talked over her as she dozed. Emily is blessed with robust health, and neither of us had ever experienced so much as a sick visit in a doctor’s office with her. Seeing our daughter in a hospital bed was a shock, but as the IV dripped slowly, her normal color recovered.

  Andy and I caught up on each other’s families. He showed me pictures of his two other children, now adolescents, and I described the complicated new family I was about to enter. We talked about our work, falling into the easy topics we had somehow managed to carve out in our almost twenty years of practice as divorced parents. As our daughter slept, we crept out of the room and into the hospital’s café, where, over sandwiches, we did something we had managed to avoid since we’d separated: We spent time together. Both of Andy’s parents had recently died after long illnesses, and he and his brother had performed the dance of children of divorce, continuing to race back and forth between parents, keeping everything separate and discreet as they tried to give equal time to each of them at the end of their lives. I was very fond of both of his parents, again separately, because I had only ever seen them together one time, at our wedding on Block Island, where one arrived by ferry and the other by whale-watching boat, and they circled one another politely without speaking.

  During our long courtship and short marriage, I often felt that Andy’s parents didn’t quite accept me. Perhaps, like my own mother, they saw us as the mismatch we were. But after my divorce from their son, each of his parents had kept in touch with me, and over the years a warmth that felt more genuine than cordial had grown between us. Andy told me he had been at his father’s bedside at the end. He said that he’d told his father about my recent engagement and that his father smiled and whispered, “Tell Amy I’m happy.”

  He died the next day. I dried my eyes on a hospital napkin as I pieced together what now seemed like a small miracle: A trip to New York. A hot day. A wedding dress. A fainting. A hospital visit. Two estranged parents finally coming together. A loose loop that stretched over great distances and two decades tightened and closed. Emily had managed to do what children of divorce often fantasize about but rarely achieve: She had reunited her parents.

  That summer, the tiny miracles continued. Bruno graded and seeded the lawn at Maryhill Farm, and somehow, despite the nearly relentless rain, grass sprouted and grew thick. We found a tent large enough to shield the caterers and guests from the weather. Desperate to find someone who could make a cake for us on short notice, we stumbled onto a nearby master baker who created masterpieces out of her kitchen. My favorite lounge band from DC said they’d load their gear into a van and drive north to play at our reception.

  This is what happens when you keep your eye on the ball and don’t obsess over the small stuff. Things either fall into place or they don’t. When they do, you celebrate. When they don’t, you do without and move on.

  Bruno held out some hope that we could get a Catholic priest to participate in our nuptials to bless our union. This led to a surreal meeting with a young priest, where he dispassionately unraveled and explained our situation. Bruno’s first marriage had been in a civil ceremony; I’d been married in a religious ceremony. We were both divorced.

  As the priest explained it, in the eyes of the Catholic Church, Bruno was never actually married (because he hadn’t been married in the church). He was free to do whatever he wanted. I was the problem. Because I had been married in a religious ceremony and because the Catholic Church does not recognize divorce, according to this priest I was still married to my ex-husband of almost twenty years. I was welcome to pursue an annulment in the Catholic Church for my Protestant marriage. This would take between two and five years.

  In the church’s parking lot, Bruno and I held an impromptu meeting of the sort that sometimes devolves into yelling and gravel-kicking. He carefully expressed no particular point of view. I did all of the talking. I told him I felt I was being punished. I pointed out the obvious absurdity of it all—that his lengthy marriage somehow didn’t actually exist, while my relatively brief one was eternal. I might have used some bad words, there in the shadow of the church. I told him that no matter what, I would not erase my other marriage. Why? Because it really happened. And you can’t just petition someone to undo the truth. Would we call off or postpone our wedding? I wasn’t sure. I had a brief vision of all those bridesmaids’ dresses and shoes languishing in the closet forever. But Bruno said, “I understand.” He seemed sadly resolute. He put his arm around me and quietly walked me to the car.

  Two weeks before our wedding, I took my mother to the funeral of her best friend from high school. Joan was her own miracle of humanity. Temperamentally, these two friends of almost eighty years were opposites. Joan had her first of five children while still in high school. She had been married and divorced several times and had married and divorced two of her husbands twice. Through it all, these lifelong friends were always Joan and Jane, Yin and Yang. Joan was the loud extrovert, while Jane was shy, reserved, and thoughtful. Joan was lively and funny and daring. Jane was careful and risk-averse. After settling in Atlanta, Joan became an actress late in life and had a small part in a couple of the Scream movies. My mother, ever the movie fan, framed Joan’s headshot and had it on her desk. She and my mother talked on the phone every week, visited one another, and wrote long letters back and forth. Joan eventually found a much younger partner and left this life as she had lived it—fiercely and on her own terms. Joan and Jane kept talking, almost t
o the very end.

  Joan’s burial was in a tiny scruffy cemetery near the house where she had grown up, in a crossroads hamlet two miles from Freeville. After the service I took my mother in her rickety wheelchair toward the little cemetery, which was overgrown and scattered with ancient lopsided headstones. The ground was uphill and extremely uneven. Mom was worried about getting up the hill to her friend’s graveside. I bent down and looked at her. Her gray eyes were watery with tears. I made a decision: “Hang on, girl—we’re off-roading.” She gripped the armrest of the wheelchair. I got a running start and muscled her up the hill, teetering and tripping over exposed tree roots and through stands of goldenrod, to her friend’s grave. A dozen people were gathered there. A bagpiper appeared out of nowhere and walked up the hill. Dressed in full Scottish dress, he wheezed out a high-decibel version of “Amazing Grace.” It was surprising and beautiful. Afterward, I caught up with the piper as he was headed to his car. I asked him if he would play our way into the chapel for our wedding. I wanted to do this as a surprise gift to Bruno. The piper told me he lived down the street from Bruno’s mother and that he would be honored. I reminded him to bring an umbrella. He said he couldn’t hold an umbrella and play the bagpipe at the same time, but maybe he could find an awning to stand under.

  And so Bruno and I ticked item after item off our list—tasks either completed or abandoned. We would be marrying each other on this day; that was all we knew for sure.

  The weather seemed to break the day before our wedding. The clouds suddenly scattered in the afternoon to tease us into thoughts of the dreamy summer we’d been denied. Our out-of-town guests arrived in Freeville and about eighty people gathered for the rehearsal dinner at Rachel and Tim’s big pink house on Main Street (our invitations had said only, “Friday night dinner at the Pink House on Main Street”—we knew people would find it). Bruno had erected a large tent on their front lawn; we borrowed tables and chairs from the United Methodist Church down the street. Clark’s Shurfine Food Mart supplied the chicken, and Fall Creek Farm the corn. The barbeque committee at the church set up their grills and cooked a hundred chicken halves. They transported the food down Main Street in wheeled coolers. My friend Margaret arrived from Washington and somehow single-handedly handled the food and table service. Margaret was a blur that night.