Both Sides Now

by Shawn Inmon

  I faced Shawn and listened as Darren talked about the solemnity of the union we were entering into and the miracle of second chances. He asked us if we had vows we wanted to make to each other. I knew I would be nervous, so I went first. I had written my vows months before, but when the moment arrived, I just took Shawn’s hand, looked him directly in the eye, and spoke from my heart.

  “What a journey—just a few years ago, I never would have believed I could be standing here with you. If we hadn’t been separated by fate, I believe we would still be together today, but I don’t know if we would have this same appreciation and love for each other. You are my best friend, my love, my soulmate. Between us, we have brought five of the most beautiful and strong women into the world: our daughters, our family. We have a love for each other that grows stronger every day.

  “I have two promises: I promise to thank God every morning for bringing you back to me, and I promise to appreciate everything you are and everything you do for me. Thank you for coming with me on this journey.”

  We never broke our gaze as we looked past each other’s eyes, into souls. I was making a lifetime vow that would never be shaken.

  Shawn reached inside his tuxedo jacket and retrieved a piece of paper and his glasses.

  “Dawn Adele, I love you more each day. That means I love you more at this moment than I ever have before, yet this is the least I will ever love you in our life together. These are my vows: I vow to always get things down off the top shelf for you without making fun of you because you can’t reach it. I vow to always open doors for you, even your car door when it’s raining really hard. I vow to bring you your first cup of coffee every day for the rest of your life. Most important to you, I vow to always be your protector from spiders large and small. Most important of all, until I take my last breath, I will never leave you.”

  Thirty-two years after Shawn first asked me to marry him, Darren said, “You may kiss the bride. Ladies and gentlemen, for the first time anywhere, it is my honor to present Mr. and Mrs. Shawn and Dawn Inmon.”

  That sounded good to me.

  It had been my idea to have the DJ play Stevie Ray Vaughan’s The House is Rockin’ as our exit music. It kind of offset all of Shawn’s romantic songs at the beginning of the wedding. And besides, we were old, but we weren’t dead, and we were going on our honeymoon.

  We stood in the fading sunshine that had blessed our special day and greeted everyone in attendance. Okay, maybe at someone else’s wedding we would have greeted them. Instead, Shawn and I laughed, hugged, cried a little, and celebrated with every person that came through our receiving line.

  We started the reception off with our first dance as a married couple. I had picked The Air That I Breathe by The Hollies for several reasons. For one, it summed up everything I was feeling. After finally getting to marry Shawn, there was nothing else I needed. Also, when we were just kids and I told him this was my new favorite song, he told me that I could only have one favorite song at a time. I had to remind him one last time how wrong he had been back then.

  When Shawn took me in his arms and led me around the empty dance floor, I was transported back to when we danced to Always and Forever in his mom’s living room after our Prom. I had thought that was the happiest I could ever be. I had been wrong.

  Just the Two of Us

  It was late by the time we were ready to leave Heritage Hall. Part of doing a big wedding on a tiny budget is sticking around after the reception and cleaning up to make sure you get your deposit back. There are two great times to find out who your real friends are: the day you move, and when you have to clean up after a party for 150 people. We found out that a lot of our old friends are real friends, because we had a lot of help. In the end, we also had way too much food, beer and wine, so no one went home empty-handed.

  We walked out to find that the kids had decorated our car for the honeymoon with condoms, negligees and by writing “Just Married” on our back window.

  Our suitcases were already packed and in the trunk, but Shawn was still in his tuxedo, so we stopped by my place so he could change. He looked good in his tux, but a lot more like my Shawn in his Beatles T-shirt, faded jeans and tennis shoes.

  Just as we were ready to get on I-5 and head south, we both realized that we hadn’t eaten a single thing all day, not even at our own wedding dinner. We had been too busy talking with friends to eat. Our first meal as husband and wife was served through the drive-through window at Jack-in-the-Box around 10:30 that night.

  We spent our first night at a 100-year-old hotel in Portland, Oregon called The Governor. It was old, but really cool and beautiful. Not that it mattered, really. After the day we’d just had, we probably could have stayed at a Motel 6 and not noticed much difference.

  The next morning, Shawn fulfilled his wedding vow by waking up before me and running to a coffee shop to get me a hazelnut latte. It didn’t take me long to adjust to a life of being spoiled by my new husband. I think I got there in one day.

  We spent the first full day of the honeymoon driving Highway 101 down the Oregon Coast. I had no idea where we were going, which was very freeing. Earlier that year we talked about going to Hawaii, but eventually we realized we could have the wedding or the honeymoon, but not both. In fact, at one point, Shawn said that we might not be able to do anything at all.

  Then Jerry and Lynn Weible stepped in and told us they wanted to give us our honeymoon as their wedding present. They owned a timeshare that allowed them to book resorts all over the country, so they worked with Shawn to come up with an itinerary for us, but I truly had no idea what it was. I had made the mistake of telling Shawn I wanted to be surprised, so now it would take high-level torture techniques to get any information out of him. It didn’t matter where we were going. We were together, we were finally married, and there was a long road ahead of us.

  We couldn’t have been bigger tourists. We stopped at every lookout and took dozens of pictures of each other with the Pacific Ocean as the backdrop. We stopped at the Trees of Mystery in Klamath, Oregon and took our picture in front of the huge statue of Paul Bunyan and Babe, the Blue Ox. Shawn felt it was necessary to point out that although he often called me “Babe,” it wasn’t in reference to that Babe. I thought it was necessary to chase him around the car a little bit, but I couldn’t catch him. He is faster than he looks.

  My favorite stop of the day was at the Legend of Bigfoot Store. There was a life-size statue of Bigfoot out by the road, and lots of T-shirts, postcards, and cheap jewelry. I walked out a happy girl with a sweet Bigfoot T-shirt and a peace sign necklace for under twenty bucks.

  We even took the cheesiest detour possible—literally. We stopped at the Tillamook Cheese Factory and took a tour. Who knew making cheese could be so fun? I guess to some people this sounds like the worst road trip since the Griswolds went on Vacation, but it was the perfect way to start our trip.

  We spent the second night in a little hotel called the Anchor Beach Inn in Crescent City, California. It was a pretty basic little place and a pretty basic motel stay, except for one thing: it was our second night as man and wife, and I’ll just say we weren’t nearly as tired as we had been the night before. It was a good night.

  By early afternoon the next day, we checked in to the condo the Weibles had reserved for us in Clear Lake, California. Neither of us had ever heard of the place before, but it took our breath away. The condo was elegant and beautiful and when we walked out on our front patio, we looked right at Clear Lake. Shawn put his arms around me and we tried to take a mental picture that would last forever.

  We stayed two perfect days in Clear Lake doing a lot of nothing but resting, relaxing and recovering from the stress of, well, everything. As it turned out, Shawn is a pretty good cook. He barbecued steaks and made us what he called his ‘perfect baked potatoes’ each night.

  The next day we drove all the way down to Oceanside, California. Our plan was to use Oceanside as a base of operations to go down to San Diego
, or up to Los Angeles to see the sights. Our plan lasted until we pulled into Oceanside and fell in love all over again. We were staying at another one of the Weibles’ condos, so that was perfect, but it was also just the town itself that charmed us.

  The first night, we went into town and found a little diner straight out of a 1950s movie. It wasn’t like one of those kitschy, nostalgic, built-in-the-nineties-to-look-like-the-fifties sort of diner though. It was one of those places that had been a diner in the fifties, and hadn’t changed even in 2010.

  Not surprisingly, one of Oceanside’s best features was that it lived up to its name. It had a long sandy beach and a half-mile long pier right off the downtown area. Even though it was the middle of October, we spent every afternoon swimming in the Pacific and lying out on towels on the beach.

  The second night in Oceanside, we went to a street fair. There was a live band playing ‘70s and ‘80s songs. We got our food and sat at a table listening to the band and watching a table full of homeless people. It looked like they had all their possessions in the world with them. They were laughing and joking and were the first ones on the dance floor every song. The thought occurred to me that if you had to be homeless, there were worse places to be than Oceanside, California; although that’s probably not the motto the city fathers want to promote.

  In the end, we never went north or south during our stay. When we left to go to our next stop, we were about a mile north of town when Shawn looked at me in all seriousness and said: “I think I’m about ready to go back. How ‘bout you?”

  We didn’t, though. We had one more stop ahead of us before we had to go back to our real life. We drove an hour or so north and stayed at another resort in Anaheim, right next to Disneyland. When I was a little girl living in Southern California, I loved going to Disneyland. I hadn’t been back in a long time and Shawn had never been there. He told me that when he felt banished from Mossyrock in 1978, he came to see his sister in Los Angeles. He drove by Disneyland, but he didn’t have any money to get in.

  Shawn thought that he might not actually like Disneyland all that much now that he had a chance to see it, but I had faith that happiest place on earth could win him over.

  We got up early and were among the first people inside the gate. It was slightly rainy that day, which seemed to work to our advantage. Lots of people seemed to be waiting out the rain, which meant that there were no lines at all, even for the Pirates of the Caribbean, the Haunted Mansion and Space Mountain.

  Our only miscalculation was trying to do Disneyland and California Adventures, the ‘new’ part of Disneyland, all in the same day. It was mid-afternoon by the time we made it over there, the sun was out and the lines were long. Still, we managed to do the Grizzly River Run twice, getting soaked both times, which felt kind of good. As we were walking out of the park, we walked past the rollercoaster called California Screamin’. Shawn said, “I was thinking about going on that one, but it looks pretty fast and pretty scary. I don’t think you’d be able to do it.”

  He was well aware that there was no better way to get me on a rollercoaster. There wasn’t much of a line for it, and five minutes later we were seated and ready for blast-off. And, for some reason, blast-off didn’t come and didn’t come. Every second that ticked by, the more I convinced I became that something had gone wrong and the less I wanted to go. Finally, after sitting there for four hours, or four minutes—I forget how long it actually was—we took off. Whatever sense I had left was officially scared out of me. It was time to go back to the condo.

  We stopped on the way back and got Chinese takeout. We sat on our balcony overlooking Disneyland, feet propped up, and ate General Tso’s Chicken. We watched the fireworks over the parks. It was the ideal ending to our day and our honeymoon. I reached over and held Shawn’s hand.

  If we had been together since we were teenagers, I know we still would have appreciated good moments like this. I just don’t think we would have appreciated the depth of goodness there is in being with your one perfect person unless you have lived your life for so long without him or her.

  How Much I Feel

  Our ‘happily ever after’ really started when we got back from our honeymoon and merged our households into our new normal life. I moved out of the Chehalis place and into Shawn’s big house on Bondgard Avenue in Enumclaw.

  I was in a new town where I knew only Shawn, and I went looking for work. I got lucky and found a part-time job in early 2011 at the local paper, the Enumclaw Courier-Herald, assisting the Circulation Manager. When she retired, I took over and became the new Circulation Manager, which is a pretty great job. It was less than a five-minute commute from our house, had good benefits, and the work was actually kind of fun most of the time.

  Things remained tough financially for us through the first part of 2011. The real estate market was still not good, and although I liked my new job, it was never really going to make us rich. That meant we struggled financially, but it didn’t transfer over into the other parts of our lives and it didn’t bother me. I was poor when I was a kid and poor all my life as an adult. It didn’t take a lot of adjusting to being poor now. This poverty was different though. Being poor with a partner made everything easier. It didn’t matter that we didn’t have any money to do anything. I was happier going home to a quiet dinner with Shawn every night than I had ever been doing anything else.

  The tough times came to a head in December of 2011 when we lost our house to foreclosure. Shawn bought it at the peak of the market in late 2006 and the payments were more than he could handle when the market crashed around his ears. Our house was foreclosed on the second week in December and we had thirty days to find a new place to live. Shawn was sad to see the house go back to the bank, of course. He never wanted to default on it, but had no way to avoid it.

  As with almost everything, there was a silver lining. Shawn had lived in that house with his ex-wife, and I couldn’t manage to be as sad as he was to see it go. No matter what we did to that house to make it our own, there was always the knowledge that it hadn’t always been ours. That would have never gone away.

  Shawn’s favorite saying is “Jump, and a net will appear.” That was true for us in this case, just like it has so often been. The very first day we went out to look at homes, we found the absolutely perfect house for us to rent. It had three bedrooms, so we had plenty of room when the kids and grandkids came to visit. It had a big deck for summer barbecues, a fenced yard for our two chocolate Labs and a gorgeous view of Mt. Rainier out our back windows. We took it as soon as we walked in, and I knew that we were finally home in a place that was completely ours.

  There were two more important things that happened in 2012, and that will at last bring our story full circle.

  The first came when Shawn published the story he had written about our life and our love, called Feels Like the First Time, on September 4th. He had started writing it two days after we ran into each other in December of 2006, so it had taken him five and a half years to finish. When I would ask him how he was coming on his book, he would often say, “How can I write the ending when we haven’t lived it yet?”

  I guess he finally thought we had lived enough of our own happy ending that he could call the book finished and publish it. The response to that book went far beyond anything we were hoping for. The overwhelmingly positive response to that book led directly to this one. Time and again, people would ask questions that weren’t answered in the first book. Shawn always told them, “I didn’t answer that question because this was my story and I never knew the answer either. If you want to know the answer to that, we’ll have to wait until Dawn decides to tell her own story in her own book.” Well, this is that book, and I hope I have answered at least most of the questions.

  The most important thing that happened came right after that, when Dani, Daniel and Yael decided to make their family status a fact of law. Less than two years after we produced our own wedding, we were back in wedding planning mode. On the day
of the wedding, Shawn was again in the kitchen, preparing to feed a hundred people on a limited budget.

  When it was time for Dani to walk down the aisle, I couldn’t hold back my tears. I had loved her since the moment she was born, but she had never been more beautiful. I watched her come down the stairs and walk to Daniel and Yael.

  Watching them exchange their vows, I knew this wedding was happening because she had been strong. She questioned authority when it was necessary and stood up for what she believed in. Dani and Daniel had accomplished what Shawn and I had not. We could never go back and fix everything that happened thirty years before, but it was a good, healthy feeling to watch the next generation get it right.

  In his book, Shawn said that when we were first together, it was like the world’s longest sleepover. More than three years later, I’m happy to say that is still true. We still argue about songs, movies and television shows just like we did as kids sitting in the side yard. I have a hunch that when we are in our eighties and sharing a room in a nursing home, we’ll still be having tickle fights and driving the orderlies and our kids crazy.

  All my life, people told me that the love I shared with Shawn wasn’t real, that love didn’t work that way in the real world. For the longest time, I believed them. In so doing, I lost my belief, both in love and in Shawn. I know how insanely lucky we are to have found each other again, that we might prove that wrong forevermore. It’s not only possible to have that crazy in-love feeling in your stomach, and feel ultimately content and happy going to sleep next to the person you love every night…

  I am, finally, getting the chance to live it.

  Afterword – Love Will Find a Way