is the day before what would have been my 61st wedding anniversary. Now that is an odd and obscene statement. It’s true though.
On May 22, 1965 I got married. I got married in a the big tan brick church on the highest point of the little town I’ve lived in most of my life. Its cornerstone says 1913 which was the year my mother was born. By 1965 she had been dead four years and it was probably her death that coused, or maybe the better word is allowed, e to be married. I was very much aware it was because she wasn’t there that I had the permission to do something like that. She had been an ambitious woman, ambitious for her kids. She had wanted us to amount to something and after her sudden death, also in May, in 1961, I had been free to do whatever I wanted to do. And so I was getting married.
I remember standing at the back of the church with my reluctant father who probably felt he had lost all his .... what? What had he lost when his wife, the mother of his children had died four years before? His guidance to a great degree. He kept living his life, he kept doing the right things, he kept doing whatever the thrd thing was, but he no longer had a purpose, a daily reason for whatever he was doing. He was a hard worker, an intelligent man. He had obligations and he tried to do the right thing. Was walking his slightly odd almost 19 year old daughter up the aisle of the big brick church the right thing to do? It didn’t matter. It was what was happening.
What I do remember is the thought that is wasn’t too late. I could still NOT to it. But I did it. And most of what has happened since is because of that walk.
It’s a lovely morning today. Probably nicer than that wedding day. It was rainy, not cold, but not a pretty day. My relatives had rallied. If it was what I wanted to do, they accepted it. My choices weren’t very vast. Life was more constricted then. There were fewer things to do, fewer ways to live. And there was the person who had agreed to marry me. His thoughts and feelings and ambitions, his family were all involved as well. And so it happened.
Today I am vastly closer to the day I die than to that day. I worry about myself. I have this list of ailments that criss cross my body. I am reaching an age where people die - everywhere and everyday. I don’t think I’d mind dying. I fantacize. A nice hotel room and some pills. The clearing under the flights of jetliners and red-tailed hawks. I want my body converted to ashes and in the word of my sister-in-law and bridesmaid, ‘strewn’. Is that what I want? What did I want that day in the back of the church? Do I want to go on? Do I want to limit my life’s possibilities? What the hell are my life possibilities anyway?
I could take the dog for a walk?
I could buy some more groceries?
I could go to the library?
I could pay the rental on my safety deposit box?
I could clear off the table.
I guess I’ll clear off the table.
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