Thirty Years Now

It was cold in Buffalo-- not like it is today, no polar vortices, but on the way to Buffalo from Grand Rapids, driving the green 67 Plymouth Fury we inherited from Rus's parents, we spun off the road in a snowstorm, and spent a considerable amount of the trip following trucks we hoped were able to see or perhaps just sense the roadway.

So by January 7 it was cold, with snow on the ground everywhere. I hadn't thought about the date when we settled on a wedding between the holiday and returning to Urbana for the semester, just that it was the first Saturday after New Year's. So I was startled when the relatives from his father's side who drove up from the Binghamton area remarked how nice it was that we were having a Christmas wedding.

A Christmas wedding, which of course it was in their eastern Catholic calendar.

A Christmas wedding. It was cold, but the city coped with winter, so there were no delays driving to the church in North Buffalo. Just delays in persuading Dad to leave the house, to get in the car and come with us. So we arrived late for our own wedding, drawing a pointless lecture from the most rigid Unitarian minister on the planet about how disrespectful it was not to be there when his schedule demanded-- even though, in fact, we were there before the ceremony was scheduled to start, and there would have been no disrespect to our guests, had he dispensed with his need to be angry.

But we endured, despite my initial impulse to walk out, have the reception and then find a JP to enact the ceremony authorized by the license that, after all, did not come from the church of no charity into which we had walked.

What we endured: no one heard the sonnet we had selected as our reading-- Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments; instead, we were treated to a reading of platitudes from Kahlil Gibran, courtesy of the reverend I had ceased even slightly to revere.

Better the reception, held, to my satisfaction, at an historic site, where the rental included extended open hours for the museum, so all our guests could learn as much as they liked about the assassination of President McKinley and the swearing in of Theodore Roosevelt. Had Sarah Vowell been around, she would have been the ideal reporter for our day.

An odd and disjoint day-- made more so by my having added a degree of difficulty and many days short of sufficient sleep, by deciding to sew, by hand, not just my dress but a tailored jacket (the first I had ever attempted) because I could do that, then, thanks to my mother.

That was a thing that connected my mother to me, and so that was important beyond sleep. She couldn't be there; I couldn't reproduce the entire wedding cake she would have made, despite my training with her in modeling icing roses, shaping each petal by hand. But she taught me to sew, and sew I did.

And then we drove off, in the car I said was large enough that I should rent it out as a student apartment,  stopping outside Indianapolis at a Red Roof Inn where I had stayed with Mom and Dad on the original journey to Urbana.

Off we drove: leaving behind two crock pots and a fondue set in a closet until we had somewhere more permanent to live, and  a slice of the wedding cake, wrapped and frozen so that a year later we could resurrect it for the traditional first anniversary celebration.