Love Letters, Part 1. Free Throwback Friday.
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We were to be married at Petersen Park, in Northport, Michigan, on a perfect June afternoon.
Anne checked the historical weather records: June 23 was always a perfect day for weddings.
As for Petersen Park: picture a bluff, a sparkling Lake Michigan, blue sky.
Picture the dreamy desert parts inThe English Patient when they’re madly in love— except there’s no desert, just dunes and dunes of romance. A wedding for the ages.
My silly, silly parents said, What about a church— you know, a roof, in case of rain?
I was 29.
So I just knew it wouldn’t rain.
On June 23, we woke to a gale.
Fifty degrees and falling. Rain flying sideways.
The folks erecting the tent at Petersen Park said that the enormous canvas had filled like a parachute and was about to lift off and fly to Milwaukee, about 40 miles away, as the tent flies, across Lake Michigan.
My father and I got in the car and drove straight to Northport. It was 6 am.
Here’s what my Dad could’ve said:
“YOU STUPID &&&%$##@@@^^ !!!!!!”
He said none of it.
He drove steadfastly through the rain. He did not insult or lecture. For this, I loved him even more, though I could not have articulated this. I didn’t know I was learning something about being a father.
We rolled into Northport just as other couples, some even in tuxedoes and wedding dresses, dashed from their cars to the doors of churches, and pounded impatiently.
They, too, were 29, and had known it wouldn’t rain.
We were too late.
We had nowhere to have this wedding. Literally.
I called Anne. Here’s Anne:
I told her the news. What I loved about her was confirmed again when she said, “Ok, I’ll make some calls.”
Anne is a reporter. Most of what I know about talking with people, interviewing them, about “making some calls,” and writing journalism, all— all of it— comes from her.
She was on the newspaper’s education beat and called the school’s superintendent and explained how we were 29, and that we’d known that it wouldn’t rain but, wow, look at it outside today, would ya?
The superintendent listened carefully and said, Ok, you can get married in the school gym. No alcohol, etc. Got it?
Anne said, Perfect, fine.
In my family, everyone is invited to everything. Third and fourth cousins. We attend the funerals of friends of friends.
On Memorial Day, my Mother and relatives visit country cemeteries where only the meadowlarks sing, planting flowers on graves of people long dead. The message is: If not for them, we wouldn’t be here.
And also: When I’m dead, don’t even think of plastic flowers.
So, we’d invited a typically smallish family crowd of hundreds and hundreds, now headed to Petersen Park to watch the wedding tent lift skyward and be sucked into the void.
Meanwhile, our friends madly decorated the Northport school gym, repositioning balloons and streamers meant for Petersen Park. They were actually having fun. The wedding was now an adventure.
For me, a disaster.
For Anne, a worse one.
She changed into her wedding dress in the girls’ locker room. She sat on the varnished bench and cried.
I changed in the boys’. Into the mirror, I said, You stupid, stupid thing.
Cellist Crispin Campbell and a string-quartet set up shop on the basketball court, sending Vivaldi swirling into the gym rafters among the basketballs stuck in the girders.
Anne emerged from one end of the gym, me from the other, and we met at center court, overlooked by a banner that read, “Go Panthers!”
She looked beautiful.
Our friends were sitting in the bleachers, I think they even cheered.
Here’s Anne as I saw her:
I’d quit a university teaching job in Louisiana to move back to my Michigan hometown and live as a writer. How to make a living as one, I had no idea. The short of it is, I had no job. Anne believed in me.
Out of sentimental reasons, I’d brought home Spanish moss to be used as a wedding declaration.
Looking back, I must’ve been thinking, “Nothing says I love you like Spanish moss.”
Our friends had draped the moss over a wooden trellis set at the tip-off circle in center court.
You walked under the trellis to approach the minister, a man we didn’t know, but who was kindly, sincere, and speaking in the voice of a country preacher in a Coen Brothers movie, got us married.
That’s when I noticed the wedding party frantically brushing at their shoulders, as if shooing away bugs.
They were shooing away bugs. Spiders.
Arachnids from Louisiana that had dropped from the trellis.
The soothing sounds of Vivaldi and the squeaking of bleachers must’ve have awakened them. Imagine their surprise to look around with their eight eyes and realize: these fools are getting married in a gym?
In the receiving line, the author Jim Harrison and his wife, Linda, approached. My Dad and Jim had attended the same grade school in Reed City. Michigan.
Jim handed me a check for $500 and a magazine editor’s name on a yellow Post-It note. “Call him. He’ll give you an assignment.”
Months earlier, on New Year’s Eve, in a bar called The Bluebird in Leland, I’d looked over at midnight and told Jim that I wanted to make a living as a writer.
It’s easy, he said. Send me something.
I was even younger than 29, so I was really sure nothing could go wrong.
I quit my job and sent him some writing. That’s how I ended up with an editor’s name and more money in my rented tuxedo’s pocket than I’d seen in a long time.
That’s how I ended up writing the essay, Marry Me, Marry Me.
I wrote it in my head as I looked at Anne as we fished near Interlochen, Michigan, at a little lake tucked beyond the pines; and as we drove what’s called the Big Open, near Jordan, Montana. Courting, that’s what they used to call it. We were courting.
I wrote it in my head as I looked over at her as I drove, at the profile of her face, as she watched the passing land. I loved the way her hair fell forward when she was reading and she reached up to tuck it behind an ear.
I wrote the essay then, too.
I thought if we could just keep the good things coming, if I could just keep believing because she believed in me… and I kept believing in her.
Other things happened that day that are also part of this story, which I have to tell you about, things which in fact make the story what is is.
These days, our friends and family say that ours was one of the best weddings ever: I mean, the spiders! And that funny, funny school gym! My Aunt Marilyn broke her arm slipping on the polished floor; but she only only had to walk across the parking lot to the hospital— it’s a small town, you know? A village, really. On a day one year later, on our first anniversary, a boy we sort of knew, because he bagged groceries at the store where we shopped, drove into the school parking lot and shot his girlfriend, and then himself.
It was years before Anne could go near the school. I blocked its presence; it didn’t exist in a physical place, but in time, and that time was to be forgotten.
But that’s the past now. We sometimes do pull into the school parking lot and sit and watch and say nothing, and I think we look for the younger outlines of ourselves shimmering against the screen of silver and green trees. I think of that young man, and his girlfriend, and their families. And I want to get out of the car and grab him and tell him, Stop.
I’m crying as I write this. I don’t know why, and I do know.
There’s a meanness in this world. Sadness. Loneliness. Too much. I’ve seen it. I’ve reported on it, been to some of those places. So have you.
And there’s love.
The place I want to go back to most of all is that gym, on that day, when it rained, and we were 29.
