Wedding anniversaries a chance at reflection
- Mike Dewey: Life Lines
- October 21, 2023
- 364
I was running out of time and had only myself to blame.
My wedding was two hours away, and I hadn’t written my vows.
When I had proposed, years and years earlier, in what felt like another lifetime, I suppose it was a gesture of commitment and fidelity, but I never really believed I’d actually get married.
You have to understand that to me, after all the misadventures and mistakes and misanthropy I had experienced, the whole notion of “till death do you part” was a pipe dream, a Hallmark card construct, something that offered a safe off-ramp for others to take.
I had a collection of letters from old girlfriends, and they pretty much revolved around the theme that no matter how they tried, I’d always steer clear of entangling alliances, a way of life endorsed not only by Thomas Jefferson, but also by Jackson Browne, Neil Young and Bruce Springsteen, my Holy Trinity of singer-songwriters.
“Though you’ll never believe it, you are capable of love,” wrote one even as a second called me “a drifter with no map” and a third claimed to have loved me “like a mad woman,” only to be rejected.
But there was something different happening in the fall of 1987.
One Saturday afternoon, the phone in my upstairs apartment rang, and before I knew it, I’d been asked out on a date, something utterly alien to me, but I found myself flattered and oddly intrigued.
I had met her once — she was looking for publicity for the local soccer organization’s sign-up period — and I remembered how nicely she was dressed and the way she crossed her legs as she made her pitch. As sports editor, I was much more accustomed to dealing with angry guys who blustered in, wanting to complain about something I’d written or how I was against their school/team.
But as I’ve said, this was a different dimension, something wonderful, and by the time the holidays rolled around, it was clear to anyone who knew me that I was living the best kind of life.
Even my father, who’d never, ever uttered a word about my social skills (or lack thereof), was impressed by this lovely woman.
After Christmas dinner, he asked me to follow him into his and my stepmother’s bedroom, where he sternly ordered me to sit down.
“If you’re going to do to her,” he said, his voice as serious as cancer, “what you’ve done to the rest, end it tonight, right now.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said, though I knew.
He looked at me as he had on the many occasions I’d let him down.
“She deserves your best,” he said. “I know you can give her that.”
It reminded me of the scene in “Network,” the one that includes Ned Beatty’s famous line, “You have meddled with the primal forces of nature, Mr. Beale, and I won’t have it! Is that clear?”
Appropriately chastened, I hung up my wandering shoes and dedicated myself to making her happy, every day in every way.
So the years went by and we fell in love and I asked her to marry me, and more years went by and we lived together and traveled, and even more years went by and I kind of forgot about getting married.
Once, before a newsroom full of witnesses, I declared something like, “I’ll do it when there’s a Democrat in the White House and the Yankees win the World Series,” a proposition so preposterous in 1990 as to seem utterly, fabulously and completely absurd.
Flash forward to the summer of 2007.
We’d been engaged for nearly 20 years, and it looked as if that was going to be the way we’d stay. Now living in coastal North Carolina, we’d left everything and everyone we’d ever known far, far behind and were doing our best to enjoy our best kind of lives.
And then, one night in July after I’d put the paper to bed and the presses were rolling, I woke her up, gently, but with a purpose.
“I think we should get married on the beach in October,” I said.
Just like that: emphatic, specific, directly to the heart of the matter.
She looked at me from her cocoon of blankets and peered up, the way a baby bird might when waiting in a warm nest for sustenance.
“It can’t be done,” she said flatly, sleepily. “Not enough time.”
Of course, by the time I got home from work the next night, she had the whole thing wired: the venue, the reception hall, the man of the cloth, the menu, the bar, the place for her to get pampered, all of it, down to the invitations, which were messages in a bottle.
All I had to do was show up and be ready to recite my vows, which I’d had 100 days to prepare and now faced a real deadline, then just two hours away. So I did what I do best, pacing back and forth in the sand as the waves rolled in, thinking, organizing, rejecting some ideas while I polished others, the whole thing happening on its own, quite organically, with me simply going along for the ride.
I’d remembered a line from “Immortal Beloved,” the Beethoven biopic, about a woman being “my better self,” and from there, the rest was easy, as long as I could get my shirt ironed and my tie tied.
Mike Dewey can be reached at Carolinamiked@aol.com or 621 Cardinal Drive, New Bern, NC 28560. He invites you to find him on Facebook, where his wedding day is still the best day of his life.