BRAINPAN LEAKAGE

Part 12 of 12

Continued from: Mahwage: Where’s Everybody Going?

…And the bride and groom said let there be food… And there was food… And the food was good… And the food cost a whole bunch of money… And there were leftovers for eons… And so on, and so on, and so on…

Yep… No two ways about it. We had food. In some respects I suppose that has also set the tone for any parties and such we have had ever since. Trust me, there’s never a shortage of food.

Because of that, one of my favorite kitchen appliances is a vacuum sealer – or, as I like to call it, the suck ‘n seal machine.  I think it’s actually called a “Foodsaver®” and the company that produced it describes the thing as a “food storage system”…Or they did… Mine is an older model that E K gave me for Christmas many years ago, so they might have changed their tag line… All I know is that I put stuff in the bag, suck out all the air, and heat seal the edge – Voila! Vacuum packed food that can survive a stay in the freezer quite a bit longer than average… Wish I’d had one of ’em back then…

Of course, as I said, the overabundance of chow made for an easy go of it over the next week (plus  a handful of days). I didn’t have to cook, simply reheat – for those of you who may be new to my blog, go back through some of the earlier entries and you’ll find out why I keep saying, “I didn’t have to cook…” In a nutshell, my bride doesn’t much care for kitchen duty… Fortunately, I already knew that coming into this…

I suppose that if we had been thinking, we would have taken a better picture or two of the spread.  In all honesty, we weren’t really thinking about much of anything, other than simply getting to the other side of all this with our sanity intact. I’m pretty sure that at some point we were both just on autopilot, which is probably why we made it without  the benefit of pharmaceuticals, shock therapy, or straight jackets.  I guess it’s lucky we even have the pictures we do since we accomplished this on a shoestring, and had way too many irons in the fire on top of it all. Looking back now, I seriously doubt we could manage to pull it together the way we did back then. I don’t know if it would be just a matter of not having the energy, or if the simple knowledge of the fact that we overcame so many obstacles – not the least of which was money – would scare us out of even trying. Of course, they say love conquers all…

And I say yet again, “whoever the hell they are… “

But, I think maybe they are correct in this case. We made it happen and  it’s one hell of a memory…

I suppose what has brought it back around in my mind at this particular point in my life is the FAQ. Because of my profession I get asked all manner of questions by fans, and this one has always been at the top of the list for some reason. Maybe because I babble on incessantly about E K, no matter where I am.

And, to fuel that fire, there is also a simple, yet very profound fact that I recently realized, as I was sitting here writing this in fact,.. Next month, February 2009, it will be 23 years since I first laid eyes upon E K and fell headfirst, unequivocally, no holds barred, just plain blithering stupid, in love with her, no matter what my co-workers had said. To me, that’s a rare thing and “lightning strike” special… (Just a quick addendum: Yes, I know, February was last month, but hey, I originally wrote this in January.)

Of course, the real cause could just be that I’m just getting old and my mind is going… That’s always a possibility…

But, to continue in the sappy, sentimental vein I have started here, time has “marched on.” Life has taken twists, turns, and thrown horrible roadblocks in our path…

Friends have gone, moved away, lost touch. Some couples that were there with us on that evening have since split, going their separate ways and finding love elsewhere, or in some cases finding happiness alone. Others have disappeared, only to reappear in unexpected places. Some are long out of touch, but not forgotten.

And, as is inevitable for us all, some family members have since crossed over the veil betwixt the worlds, leaving us to face this existence without them. In that respect, one of the worst of the “potholes” along the road was the sudden and very unexpected loss of my mother just a scant few weeks after the wedding, but that is, as I often say, a different blog.

And what of Erin? (Remember Erin?)… Well, I cannot tell a lie… That little parenthetical tag throughout these missives was just me having fun. Erin was one of those friends who moved away and with whom we lost touch. E K and I both hope she is doing well, and if she happens to be surfing the web some day and stumbles across this blog, maybe she’ll drop us a line… We’d love to hear from her.

But, through it all: trials, tribulations, loss, gain, joy, sadness, and speed bumps galore, E K and I remain. Together and weathering whatever we must.  We still live in that very same house where we took our vows, where I dropped her ring, and where she strapped on her stockings with rubber bands.  We eat our meals in the room where our friends and family gathered to watch my bride smear me with cake; and we watch the morning news sitting in a chair that rests right before the window where we giggled while fumbling with our rings. Our paid-too-much-for fixer upper is paid off now,  free and clear… And the remodeling we began way back when is long done, along with many other projects since. So long done in fact that we are probably even due for a bit of a redecorate.  We have a wonderful child, we’ve both changed jobs, and I’ve even changed careers, abandoning my life as a tech to pursue my dream to be a writer. So far, that has worked out well. And, as beautiful as E K was on October 31, 1987, in my estimation she just keeps getting prettier every single day.

And, you know what else? My heart still goes “pitter-pat” whenever she enters the room – just like it did that fateful and fortunate day back in 1986 when I turned a corner in a tech center and found her waiting…

Yeah, yeah, okay… I can hear you screaming – “Sheesh, Sellars… All right already… Enough with the sappy Hallmark Channel^TM crap… What does this have to do with food… Or was that just a ploy to get us here so you could throw down some kind of Nicholas Sparks inspired frou-frou on us?”

Well, in all honesty, no it wasn’t intended as a bait and switch. I just guess nostalgia has a way of creeping up on a person and taking over. But, we’ll talk about that  later…

So, the food…

Take a good look at the pictures from the wedding… You’ll see cake, chafing dishes filled with veal parmigiana, ham, rice… Plates filled with dollar rolls, cheese, condiments… But, what’s missing?

Well, I can easily understand if you are having trouble with the “where’s Waldo” scenario here, so let me refresh your memory just a bit… Remember earlier in this story when E K and I planned the menu and blew a wad of cash at the Honey Baked Ham® Company? Part of what ate up that chunk of change from our budget were the boxes of fancy hors d’oeuvres… Or, as the young man behind the counter called them, much to E Kay’s amusement, Whores Duh-Vores…

It was probably a solid month later when it dawned on us that all of those expensive mini quiches, bite sized meat pies, and unpronounceable little appetizer morsels never made it to the table that night. They were still nestled snug and chilly in their boxes, stacked neatly in the chest freezer downstairs… That was our final glitch for the evening, not that anyone even noticed…

Still, it opened a door and presented an opportunity we simply could not pass up… When lives  settled down once again over the following weeks, we set our plan into motion… We gathered our friends, filled the fridge with beer, wine – even a bottle or two of the bubbly – and baked those boxes of goodies…

We had our party… Even if it was several weeks late.

And now, sadly – in my way of thinking, at least – we have come to the end. Not of Brainpan Leakage, of course… I plan to bore you with many more stories of the lunacy that is my life. Nor is it the end of E Kay’s and my story…  It’s merely the ellipsis at the end of this particular chapter in a memory book that will hopefully just continue to grow for untold years to come.

I know that many of you have come to expect humor from me at every turn – be it silly, dry, acerbic, or even hidden… I hope that I was able to inject some of that into this tale, and into your lives with it. I realize, of course, that some – maybe even a good portion – of this was sappy and sentimental. Well, I’m a sappy and sentimental guy, especially when I come down with a bad case of nostalgia. Don’t worry, I’m taking something for it and the doctors assure me it should clear up soon – although they say I will always be at risk for a sudden relapse, (or two or three), in the future. But, what I can definitely say about this attack of nostalgia is that in writing this multi-part answer to a frequently asked question I have been given a gift. While it may seem like nothing more than random babbling to some of you,  committing this slice of my life to “paper” has allowed me to relive something in much more depth and detail than the cursory re-tellings I’ve given in the past.

And, for that, those of you who asked the question that made this series of blog entries happen, have my humble and profuse thanks. You have given me something, that while it was there all the time, had been hidden behind better than two decades of day to day life, still in my heart but obscured from my view.

In any case, if the sentimentality here has managed to get your panties all in a bunch, just remember I warned you about it at the outset, so don’t bother to send any complaint letters…It won’t do you any good because I’ll just give them to E K, and trust me, you don’t want her answering them… (I keep telling you people she’s evil…)

Now… What with this little blog “mini-series” being born of a FAQ and all,  I suppose I should move along to the next question. So, as to the query about how our daughter came to be…

Well, you see, when a man and woman love each other…

Nah… On second thought I think I’ll just let you call the local high school and ask the biology teacher about that one.

More to come…

Murv

Part 8 of 12

Continued from: Mahwage: The Wedding Suit…

… Actually, in retrospect, the title of this entry, while close, isn’t entirely on the mark. Truth is, it was more along the line of, Swish! Clink! Ping! Clatter! Roll Roll Roll… “Oh Crap!” Clatter! *Plink!* Clatter! *Tink!*  “No No No!” Clank! Rattle… (eerie silence)… All followed by a quietly muttered, “Dammit…”

But let’s not get into a deep analysis of my attack of onomatopoeia just yet. Don’t worry, I promise we’ll get back to it… I mean, given the title of this entry, I really kinda don’t have any choice in the matter…

But first, a picture… Here on the left we have a photo of the happy couple.  Aren’t we cute? E K is gorgeous, just like I said… And me, well, I’m young, no grey to be seen, and  a whole lot thinner than I am today… (I’ve really gotta work on that)…  And check out those Clark Kent goggles… At this stage of the game our official and legal union is right around 4 minutes 27 seconds old. We have not yet had a fight, or even a minor disagreement. No spat of any kind. This is not to say we never have since, or that we hadn’t prior… That would just be untrue.  All couples have “disagree-uments” to one degree or another.  I’ve learned over the past 22+ years, however, that E K always wins… But, every now and then if the planets are aligned just the right way, or wrong way as the case may be, this important little fact slips my mind. And, when it does, I  make the mistake of disagreeing with her. In the grand scheme of things, however, there isn’t anything to worry about. The Evil One immediately points out the error of my ways, puts me back in my place on the end of the leash, and life is once again good…

But, back to the picture above… At 4 minutes 27 seconds into this odyssey, all was bliss. Given that the “not having a suit thing” could have been an even  bigger debacle than it turned out to be, this was reassuring. However, what you cannot see here is that yet another issue had cropped up shortly before this photo was taken, and it was a bit of a speed bump in and of itself. I shall endeavor to explain…

Zero hour was approaching fast. In fact, we were literally at T-Minus 60, or thereabouts. Family and a few friends had arrived a bit earlier to help with the last minute preparations. My sister had pitched in and taken over the final cooking so that I could grab a shower and get dressed. Erin, (remember Erin?) was there setting up the chafing dishes… My dad was assuming his role as unofficial photographer while helping with chairs, tables, and setting up the luminaries E K had made for decorations. Things seemed to be right on track.

My sister, Missy, had finished up with the cooking and was now off in the bedroom helping E K with her hair, since one of Sis’s learned talents happened to be hairdressing. These days she handles video conferencing and support for families of deployed soldiers, and is damn good at it, but that’s one of those “nother blogs”…

I, myself, was being the somewhat typical nervous groom. Not that I had suddenly decided to bolt or anything. Quite to the contrary, I was still coming to terms with the fact that E K had finally said yes, and my jangly nerves were a product of the fact that I figured I would be waking up at any moment and hearing, “No, not right now,” rolling off  of my betrothed’s tongue.

In all honesty, to this day there are still times when I think that is going to happen, but there we go with my personal insecurities again…

So, does anyone remember Service Merchandise? Yeah, I know, that was a rough transition there, but I still haven’t had my coffee quota just yet today, so please bear with me… If you are unfamiliar with them, they are a semi-defunct chain of catalog showrooms. I say semi-defunct because they disappeared around 2002, but from what I just looked up it appears they returned as an online store sometime in 2008. In any event, there used to be a Service Merchandise out at Northwest Plaza (or, N W P). One of their charms was the fact that they sold okay quality jewelry on the cheap. Well, if you haven’t picked up on it throughout this blog series so far, I will remind you here… E K and I were pretty much too broke to pay attention, just like most young couples when they are first starting out. We knew we could have a “ringless” ceremony, but we didn’t want to do that. We were foregoing much of the pomp, circumstance, and religious frou-frou already, what with us both being secular humanists, me with a rich and diverse background in earth/eco-centric religions and Paganism, of course. In fact, we had even written our own secular vows, which her father embellished of his own accord, but I don’t hold that against him. He’s a Baptist minister and he wasn’t about to preform the ceremony without sticking God in there somewhere… I get that. Didn’t care for it, but I get it. So, all was good.

Anyway, back to this ring situation. We were going secular and eschewing much of the “ceremony” associated with a wedding already, but we wanted to retain at least some bit of symbolism, that being the rings. So, since we were  “poor,” so to speak, we had gone to Service Merchandise out at N W P, and purchased a matching set of plain, 10K white gold bands. Not very fancy, but it didn’t matter to us. They were symbolic enough…

(On a side note… Even though I have since presented my bride with a much fuller set of precious gold, replete with a sparkly, ancient rock collection mounted upon it, she still wears that simple band on a regular basis. I still have mine too, but it lives on my key chain. You see, it doesn’t fit over my arthritic knuckles anymore, and while I have a newer, fancier ring that I wear when I get “duded up”, that simple band goes with me everywhere… Yeah, okay, I’ll turn off the sappy faucet before there’s a flood…)

Now, let’s get back around to that hairdo… Why hairdo? Well, you see, while E K was in the bedroom getting even prettier than she already was, (and still is, of course), I was also doing something about my own appearance. In particular, my hair… Y’all who have seen me these days know that I pretty much have a wash and wear, stick it in a ponytail and go, kind of “do”… But, back then, as you can see in the picture, I had 80’s hair. Not “hair band” hair, but just regular old 80’s hair. For you youngsters who don’t remember the 80’s, what that means is, feathered bangs, a love affair with a blow dryer, and a lot of hair product, namely mousse.

So, there I was, standing in the bathroom in front of the mirror. I was already dressed, sans jacket just yet, and was putting the finishing touches on my “do”. Like I said earlier, we were at about T-minus 60 and counting, so things were starting to roll and I wanted to be prepared so that I didn’t screw up any more than I already had… (remember the hangover, not having a suit, etc… Need I say more?) Well, Scott, the 6 foot 6 inch tall cop, best man, yadda yadda, and his wife had not yet arrived, therefore I had not been able to hand over Kat’s ring to him for safekeeping. So, in my desire to not forget to do something as important as that, I was keeping her ring on my own finger… Now, obviously she has petite little hands, so I had it jammed onto my right pinky finger. It was on there pretty good too. In fact, my biggest worry was actually how much skin I was going to lose when I peeled it off to give to Scott prior to the ceremony proper.

Now… Have you ever had anything happen to you in slow motion? You know, some event befalls you and it is as if time has dilated for you, and only for you… You feel disembodied, like you are watching everything from above as no more than an observer. It drags on before your eyes, flowing languidly along, unfolding like a horror that you can do nothing about, until it reaches its final, sometimes near devastating conclusion, and then suddenly life speeds up once again? Yeah, just like Hollywood special effects, but it’s for real…

Well, that’s exactly what happened to me.

I pulled the brush through my hair, then flipped it back forward to make sure the volume of my “do” was just so, and suddenly I was out of body… Watching as…

Swish! Clink! Ping! Clatter! Roll Roll Roll…

In a muffled, slow motion drone I heard myself say, “Oh Crap!”

Clatter! *Plink!* Clatter! *Tink!*  “No No No!” Clank! Rattle Rattle… (eerie silence)…

Time sped back into its normal flow and I returned to my body with an unceremonious plop, only to find that I was now kneeling on the bathroom floor and staring in abject horror at the air conditioning vent. This is right about the time the “Dammit” rolled off my tongue.

The tiny little band that had been wedged so tightly upon my digit had for some unknown reason elected to go on a trip. As I was concentrating on my coif, oblivious to its escape plans, the damn thing had seized the opportunity to eject itself from my finger. Once free it had flown through the air, bounced from the mirror, fallen into the sink, jumped out of the sink, clattered across the top of the vanity, rolled off the edge, plonked off the toilet seat, rolled across the floor, bounced against the wall, jumped up, done a double back flip, followed by a triple Salchow, then executed some other kind of fancy spin, and then did a straight in dive between the slats in the grate that covered the AC vent in the corner, before finally sliding down the duct work and falling silent… All while I groped, grabbed, and stumbled after it. I’m pretty sure I heard the silly round thing laughing at me the entire time too…

On that note, the judges gave the ring a 9.5… I think I got a 2.

This was going to be a problem.

Now remember, I was already nervous, and quite honestly I was still hung over too. So, I have to say I am fairly proud of myself for what I accomplished next. You see, even in my muddled mind angles were now being plotted on imaginary graphs that only I could see, trajectories were being simultaneously calculated, and flight dynamics of gold bands reverse engineered at lightning speed. My brain was ker-chunking like Univac on a mission to save the world. Advanced calculus equations I had labored over when in school suddenly became old hat as I plotted the path of the ring, right down to the millimeter, and within seconds, determined the exact location where it had to have come to rest in the duct work.

With no time to lose I bolted from the bathroom and out to my car… You see, back then I worked as a computer technician, so I was kind of like Paladin. Have tool bag, will travel…

I was keeping this horrible incident to myself, so as yet I had said nothing about what had happened. Fortunately, no one seemed to have heard me cursing  earlier, so everything was good… Or, so I thought. Screwdriver in hand, I raced back into the house, my sights locked on the basement door. However, as with any covert mission, just when you think everything will go without a hitch, the proverbial wrench gets thrown into the works by an insane howler monkey… Well, maybe not an insane howler monkey, but I just really wanted to say that, because I think monkeys are funny. Especially howler monkeys… And rhesus monkeys… And spider monkeys… And… Well, you get the idea…

At any rate, I was three steps from the basement door when I came face to face with my soon-to-be-mother-in-law. My mad dash, combined with my inability to keep the wild-eyed “what the f*ck have I done?!” look off my face had apparently attracted her attention.

“Murv, what’s wrong?” she asked.

I hemmed and hawed for a second. It seems that the clarity I had found during the period of doing advanced mathematical calculations moments before had now fled, leaving me conversationally brain dead. I simply could not think of anything to say other than the horrible truth.

“I dropped Kathy’s ring down the air-conditioning vent,” I mumbled.

At this point, almost-mom-in-law looked at me like I was a complete idiot, and then she said with an unmistakeably admonishing screech in her voice, “Oh, Murv!”

And, yes… For the record, that was when I discovered exactly where E K learned, “the look.” You know, the one that makes you feel about 3 inches tall…

I also believe, with all my heart, that this was probably a defining moment which set the tone for my relationship with my mother-in-law all these years. I say that because I’ve heard “Oh, Murv!” several times since that day… But I digress… (Oh, and another for the record note… I really do love my mother-in-law. She’s a wonderful lady. How could she not be? She’s E Kay’s mom.)

Back to the crisis…

Kat, still in the process of getting hairdoed, make-upped, perfumed, and dressed to the nines, hears her mother with the keen acoustic acuity only an offspring, grown or otherwise, can possibly have, and instantly pokes her head out of the bedroom door and asks with alarm, “What’s wrong?”

At this point, whichever vacuum tube in my head hadn’t yet warmed up, suddenly came on line. Flashes of the “one eyed E K stare at the front door,” the “Okay, come with me,” huff, and each and every of my bride’s reactions to all of the other stupid acts I had committed in the past year now flashed through my brain. I knew I couldn’t stop my mother-in-law from selling me out, but I could make it a moot point if I lied through my teeth and turned a screwdriver really, really fast…  So I did the only thing I could do…

I looked at her and said, “Nothing honey. Don’t worry…” Then made a bee-line for the basement like my life depended on it…

Knowing E K, it probably did…

And, just so you know, I had another worry rattling around inside my skull. You see, I didn’t exactly ace my math courses when I was in school…

More to come…

Murv

… NEXT: Mahwage: Fool For Your Stockings…