BRAINPAN LEAKAGE

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…

Part 5 of 12

Continued from: Mahwage: So I Have This Idea…

…And I’m, gonna get maie air air reed…

Okay, old song reference, I know. I’ll stop singing now.

Unfortunately, Tom Hanks wasn’t available for my bachelor party… He was busy building his career as I was preparing to embark upon this odyssey.  But, that really didn’t matter. Given that at that point in history we weren’t on speaking terms – and we aren’t right now either, for that matter ,(probably because we’ve never met), I figured I’d just find someone else to arrange the entertainment.

But, let me back up a second…

In the last blog, E K finally said yes to the big question. While you would think that I would have jumped up and run around the room screaming, “She said YES! She said YES! WooHoo, she said YES!” – a very logical assumption given the circumstances, mind you – the reality is, I didn’t. Truth be told, it took something on the order of 30 seconds, maybe even a full minute for it to sink in that she had given me an answer that was vastly different, and diametrically opposed to the one she had been giving me to date.

Now I had a problem. No ring. Yeah, back when I had originally broached the subject I didn’t have one either… I had just been winging it. Given the answers I had been getting, I hadn’t been in a hurry to go purchase one either… Fortunately, my frugal live-in girlfriend turned fiancee didn’t mind. I think that just for grins we ended up using a cable tie, or piece of string, or something innocuous that was laying around the shop at the time. I doubt she even has it anymore because she’s nowhere near as sentimental as me, but watch her read this blog and prove me wrong. If she does, I’ll be sure to let everyone know…

(Just as an aside, for the record, a few years later when things were no longer so tight, I saw to it that she received a full blown engagement/wedding set with as much gold and as many sparkly rocks as I could manage in a tasteful ring…)

At any rate, now a snowball began rolling downhill, and it just kept growing…

For one thing, we made arrangements to take E K’s parents to dinner, whereupon I asked her father if it would be okay for me to marry his daughter. Yeah, I know, old fashioned, but even though it seemed to surprise him I think he appreciated the gesture.

Then, we were in the middle of buying the house, which as noted in the first of this blog series, was a fixer-upper from hell. I suppose we were just in such a hurry to get out of the duplex – not because it was a bad place, mind you. Not at all. In fact, it was actually very nice, and the landlord was a great guy too. You see, it’s just that the lease had a “verbal-handshake” rider saying no pets.

I can see the question marks now… Yeah, Kathy’s cats… explain that one, Murv…

Well, you see, we had signed the lease on the duplex and were in the middle of shaking hands when the landlord said, “Oh, I forgot to ask, you don’t have any pets do you? Because, they aren’t allowed…”

At this point, E K and I simply looked at one another then turned to him and lied through our teeth. We had been looking for an apartment for what seemed like forever, and this was the first one in our price range that hadn’t rejected our application due to my rocky credit history and hers as well – you see, she wasn’t delinquent on anything, but having been married and at that point not officially divorced just yet, her name was tied to her ex-husband’s debts, which made it look like she owed way too much to way too many folks to be able to afford an apartment.

So, re-acquiring the earlier thread – we bought ourselves a fixer upper. Being twenty-somethings, giddy in love, and in a hurry to get out of an apartment before we had to sign another year long lease, we probably didn’t inspect things quite as closely as we should – and, by the same token, probably paid far more for the house than it was worth, which is most likely why they accepted our offer immediately with no qualms whatsoever… But, oh well, live and learn…

Here’s the thing – we had set the date for our wedding to be October 31. Halloween. Samhain. Not the traditional sort of date, but hey, given that on that night the veil between the worlds is said to be at its thinnest, relatives and friends who had already gone over to the other side (i.e. croaked) would find it much easier to attend… Hey, works for me.

At this point, all manner of things were in motion – for one, we were beginning to wonder if we were going to have to postpone the wedding for legal reasons. It seems the attorney handling E K’s divorce had been ditzing about, and while it was one of those uncontested, sign on the dotted line, thank you very much, goodbye sort of divorces, the legal eagle had been postponing and postponing getting the paperwork filed. She seemed to have a bit of a procrastination issue. Rule number 1, never use an attorney who advertises in the TV guide. Yeah, I’m not kidding… But, in this case it wasn’t EK’s “frugalness” to blame, it was the ex-husband’s militant stinginess. There’s a huge difference… But, I digress… The thing here being, in the state of Missouri you have to be  legally divorced for X number of days, (I can’t remember the actual number), before you can remarry. Or at least at that time, (back in the dark ages), that’s the way it was. I’m not sure what the statutes are these days.

Fortunately, the procrastinating mouthpiece finally got off the pot , or sh*t, or whatever she needed to do that she had actually already been paid to do.   The old marriage was dissolved and we ended up meeting the deadline with something on the order of 3 days to spare. So, that was all good.

Now came the new money issues… Obviously, since Kathy had been married before her parents weren’t going to pop for a wedding, even if they could have afforded it, so it was all on us. And, we had just bought a house, so we weren’t exactly flush with excess cash. We looked at halls, and even hotel suites, to rent for a reception but just couldn’t hammer them into our budget, no matter how hard we tried or which corners we cut. So, we finally made a decision… We would pour our limited funds into fixing up the house as best we could in the interim, buy some food, and have the wedding right there in the living room…

Yeah. Stupid eh? Well, we were young. Give us a break.

The problem we faced now is that by the time we reached this decision and had officially closed on the house, we only had about 30 days to make this happen. Somehow we did… (Remind me to tell you sometime about running a floor sander for hours on end…)

Of course, in the pictures you will see over the next few installments, it is obvious that things are woefully unfinished – no baseboards, partially sanded woodwork, and don’t even get me started on the kitchen, which remained untouched as far as remodeling for a few years. We were concentrating on the living room and dining room, since that was where things were to take place. The rest was, unfortunately, temporary storage for the time being…

So, where did this leave us? Obviously planning a wedding and reception, but it also left us being our own caterers as well. And, being the eclectic, bizarre folks we are, we didn’t want all the traditional wedding food one has , in Saint Louis, at least.  That being tasteless roast beef, baked mostaccioli, and green beans almandine. No, we just had to be different. Therefore, our menu ended up consisting of a spiral cut Honey Baked Ham® from none other than the Honey Baked Ham® company themselves. In addition, we also served veal parmigiana, and apple-rice curry. Erin, remember Erin from ComputerTrend, the busty blonde? Well, Erin’s husband was actually a restaurant manager at a local country club so he loaned us some extra chafing dishes they had laying about, which was a huge help. With that, we were almost finished with the menu save for several large boxes of assorted heat and serve hors d’oeuvres, also purchased from HBH… When we placed that order the guy at the counter called into the back, “I need x y number of boxes of Whores Duh-Vores…” E K had plenty of fun with that…

We ordered up a keg of beer,  and I even picked up everything I needed to make sauce for the veal patties. We should have been set, but we weren’t…

My dad dropped by for a visit and asked how things were going. Beaming, we told him all was good, and outlined the menu choices. He nodded, grunted, then asked, “So what kind of cake are you getting?”

Kathy and I looked at one another. Then we looked at him. Then we looked at one another again.

I said, “Uhm…uhh…”

Kathy said, “I guess we aren’t. We can’t afford one.”

My father raised an eyebrow, then snorted and said, “Bullshit. You can’t get married without a cake.”

With that, he reached into his wallet and withdrew a 100 dollar bill and handed it to Kat while adding, “Let me know if it costs more.”

And so, we went “cake shopping”… This was new to me. Even with all my experience with restaurants and diners, (on my mother’s side of the family) , I had never been all about the baking end of things… So, I did what any self-respecting man should do… I gave in to whatever E K wanted, listened closely so that if she needed help making a decision I chose whatever it sounded like she was leaning toward, and voila… We had a cake…

At this point all of the guys reading this are probably doing a rundown – “Lemme see… ya’ got ham, ya’ got beer, ya’ got cake… Yep, we’re good.”

If I had to guess, however, I’d say you women readers are most likely all pretty antsy at this point. I suspect – though I may be wrong – that you’re probably dancing around in your seats, shaking your fingers at the screen, and muttering, “But… but… but… what about… but…“

Do you mean, “What about The Dress?”

Yeah, I figured as much.

So, yeah… We also had to go wedding dress shopping. Yet another new experience for me, especially since I was wholly unaware that the groom was in any way involved in the selection of the dress.

Okay… We’ve established that this wasn’t Kat’s first rodeo. In addition to that, our house isn’t all that big, (i.e. no room for a 90 foot long train), and we were out of money. Also, while she can be as girly girl as the next woman, she isn’t all about too much foo-feraw…

And so, we went wedding dress shopping at… wait for it… Kmart®. Yeah, “Definitely Kmart, definitely definitely definitely Kmart…” I think I might have even picked up a 3 pack of tighty-whities while we were there.

Now, before you ladies get together a mob to come after me, it wasn’t my idea. It was Kathy’s. But, let me tell you something, she picked out an incredible dress and couldn’t have looked any better in my opinion, and it came in at around 40 bucks. She already had a brand new pair of white heels, so no new shoes were needed in her estimation. See what I mean about her being frugal? Yeah… it amazes me too…

So… Now were were set. She had a dress, we had a menu, the polyurethane was dry on the newly refinished hardwood floors, and we even had rings… we’ll get to those in a bit. My best buddy, Scott Ruddle, (after whom Detective Benjamin Storm in the RGI novels is modeled), was tapped to be my best man, and Erin (remember Erin?) was to be Kathy’s Matron of Honor. We had a license, and we even had a preacher – Kathy’s father, who is a Baptist Minister…

The day was fast approaching, and little did we know all hell was about to break loose…

More to come…

Murv

… NEXT: Mahwage: Mobile Bachelor Party…