MAY 1986, THE LAST WEDDING

It was a cloudy, wet, day, in May 1986 for the last wedding.

Like so many raised on the Oregon coast, a cloudy, wet, day, is good luck no matter where you are.

Everything was done, everything set in Sandy, from rented morning coats to a rented preacher.

The preacher was a second choice.

We met the first guy in his church spewing fire and brimstone, which is his right, but also calling Portland Sodom and Gomorrah.

I wasn’t as tuned to the Bible as old yeller at the pulpit, but it sounded like he said ‘sodomize a whore’, which didn’t fit the theme of the day.

 

 

After the modern day Elmer Gantry we found someone else to execute the wedding vows.

 

All Gathered

From far and wide friends and family showed up in Sandy, Oregon for the last wedding.

By then my parents had been married twice, my new in-laws had a few marriages between them, and my brother in-law was never getting married.

The plan was for everyone getting rooms or cabins in the same place, but one family needed an RV hook-up and another went along with them.

The motel with the RV park had rooms with mirrors on the ceiling and champagne on ice with a flooded RV park from all the rain.

Still, the show went on.

Someone tuned on the weather report.

More rain.

 

PORTLAND, Ore. — Radioactivity in Portland rainwater from the Soviet nuclear plant accident has fallen from a level that was the highest detected in the country, but levels in air samples — although still very low — continue to rise, officials said Saturday.

Oregon Health Division workers measured 392 picocuries per liter of iodine 131 in rainfall samples from 11:30 a.m. to 6 p.m. Friday, far lower than the 5,250 picocuries detected during a three-hour period earlier in the day, from 8 a.m. to 11 a.m.

 

Still, The Show Goes On

Who gets credit for sticking together over the long run?

Henny Youngman said, “I’ve been married to the same woman for forty-eight years. Where did I go wrong?”

Funny guy. Now everyone is funny. Funny like ha ha.

I talked to some folks who grew up in the seventies like I did. (My decade spanned the age of 15 to 25 from 1970-80.)

Looking back, it was a fast ten years.

 

It also seems like ancient times, the time before AIDS.

If you were in a certain group it was a time to be young and do young kind of things.

Be a little rootless, be a little lost, and watch the world grow more responsible, more married.

However, if you weren’t married . . .

The girl moving out of town?

The girl looking for a summer fling?

The girl who got her own apartment to show her parents she had a life?

 

Those were some of the girls I knew before I met the one who said what’s what.

They were all good girls and deserved better than me.

As a ‘half-listener’ in most every relationship I’ve had, I practiced distraction.

But this time I leaned in to be sure what I was hearing.

She’s telling me what’s what?

 

Why would anyone tell some odd stranger living alone in a third floor studio apartment on Lovejoy in NW Portland anything that matters since it looked like I wasn’t listening anyway?

She was going to sway some smooth operator into the mainstream of marriage, kids, and a house in the suburbs?

Good luck with that.

This has all the elements of a ‘dodged a bullet’ kind of story, a ‘not going down that path’ story.

But she kept talking and I kept listening. She had an interesting story.

 

My girl learned how to drive in LA.

Not near LA, but in LA, on an LA freeway, as she likes to say.

 

I made sure she knew I was a temporary stand-in for the man of her dreams, reminding her that she didn’t want anything to do with the likes of someone like me.

It always worked before, being a discouraging romantic, and no one stuck around.

 

 

But we stuck around each other, found time for sticking around each other.

I liked having her around, she liked being around.

We came to the same conclusion: if we liked being around each other we ought to get married.

 

PS:

It was a cold, rainy day in May, 1986 for the last wedding.

PSS:

And it’s a wedding that keeps sticking around.

So does Ruby.