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 7 of 12

Continued From: Mahwage: Mobile Bachelor Party…

… Morning arrived way too damn early that particular October 31st. I mean, I know morning pretty much always arrives early, which is part of its job description as “morning” after all. But on that one Saturday in 1987, I am firmly convinced that it arrived several hours ahead of  its regular schedule. Hangover aside, I’m telling you, someone was screwing with the fabric of time, probably just to f*ck with me personally…

You just watch… Some physicist will eventually figure out that when they first switched on that new Large Hadron Collider, a minuscule temporal ripple shot backward through the space-time continuum and completely f*cked up the clocks on October 31st, 1987. Mark my words, it’ll come out someday…

For the record, I really believe this. Well… Not really… But you have to admit it sounds good…

But, let’s move on…

Yeah, I was hung over. I was hung over like nobody’s business. In fact, I have not been that hung over again since that day, nor do I believe I was ever that hung over prior to that day. I was H U N G O V E R with a capital everything… Shoot me now. End my misery. Oh toilet bowl, you are my only friend… Whatever God is up there listening to me, I promise I’ll never do it again… Yeah. That hung over.

And E K had absolutely no sympathy for me whatsoever… The Bitch!

Now I suddenly knew what all those people at ComputerTrend were talking about. My bride-to-be was just plain heartless…

Okay, again, not really. And I’m just joking about the “bitch” thing… Really…  I am. Just don’t tell her I said it, okay? Good… Now, the truth is, looking back on the situation I can certainly understand her lack of sympathy… And,  in reality I could even understand it back then too, even as I hugged the porcelain and told it all about my friend Ralph… I mean,  after all, I had done it to myself… But, of course, that didn’t make me whine any less…

And then to make matters worse, (as if they weren’t bad enough already), there were these things called Belly Bombers churning around in my gut… We will just skip any details surrounding my ingesting of those evil little burgers, (which, to this day, I still ingest), or more accurately my inevitable expulsion thereof… Suffice it to say, the throne room was my kingdom for quite some time that morning, and much air freshener was sprayed from flowery painted aerosol cans…

Once I managed to get myself cleaned up and my eyeballs moved back to the proper side of my face, (although they still weren’t actually working properly, and kind of had the whole overused teabag sort of feeling for the rest of the day,) I set about helping the lovely, though miffed, E K set things up for the evening. Of course, one of my duties was cooking, so I managed to stay out of her way some of the time by doing just that. I had prepared the sauce for the veal parmigiana a couple of days ahead of time, the ham was already cooked, and my soon-to-be mother-in-law was handling the apple-rice curry, so most of the prep work had been done…  It really just came down to a bit of frying, heating, assembling, and arranging in the chafing dishes.

Sometime around early afternoon, E K was going through her mental checklist to make sure we hadn’t missed anything too important in the grand scheme of the evening. As she rattled things off, I answered check, yo, yeah, or whatever response was warranted for each thing. Eventually she came to an item for which I had no answer, therefore I remained silent…

After  a handful of heartbeats, assuming I had not heard her, she asked again, “Your suit?”

And again, I remained silent…

Assuming I had gone temporarily deaf, my soon-to-be-wife raised her voice and queried once more, “Murv? What about your suit?”

Finally, after a bit more awkward silence, I cleared my throat, hemmed and hawed, then replied, “Uhm… I have sport coats. I don’t have a suit.”

At this juncture E K was looking at me like I was a puppy who had just left a big piddle puddle on the carpet for the 37 thousandth time. I wasn’t quite sure what she was going to rub my nose in, but I could clearly see that it was coming.

“You don’t have a suit?” she asked.

“Uhm… No,” I replied.

“We’re getting married in a few hours. What were you planning to wear?”

“Uhm… I dunno.”

I knew that was the wrong answer. Hell, most of the time even I won’t accept it as a valid answer unless I really and truly believe the “answerer” doesn’t actually know, in which case I generally don’t even bother to ask in the first place.  E K didn’t want to accept it either, but by this point she knew that her soon-to-be-husband was pretty much a hopeless case, at least in his present condition.

“Okay, come on,” she announced in a huff as she snatched up her keys and purse, then all but took me by the hand and led me out the door.

Now, at this point in the story, I have a question for all of you… Were any of you folks aware that unless you spend right around enough to buy a compact car, it is impossible to purchase a suit and have it altered the same day? You were? Well, it came as a shock to me. I figured what with all those sewing machines and stuff they could at least do a nip here and a tuck there… You know, just enough to make it presentable for the evening.

Well obviously, such services were nowhere within our budget. And, what with me having Basset Hound legs and Barney Rubble arms, the suits we found on the rack were definitely going to need a bit of a touch up. We finally found something on sale, at a decent price, that E K approved after doing the reverse Pretty Woman scenario with me. (Once again, it is my contention that the scriptwriters had to have been in St. Louis and witnessed the Dillard’s shopping spree, because we did this long before the movie…)

But, since I’m not going to get any royalties, I suppose I should move on… But, you know, I’m just sayin’… Yeah, okay… I know… Digressing again… Back to the story…

So, with new suit in hand, even though the pant legs  and arms of the jacket were 49 feet long, we raced back home. The wedding was scheduled to take place right there in our living room at 6 PM.  At this point, we were only a scant few hours from achieving critical mass… But, while I now had something to wear, my new fancy duds were pretty much going to make me look like Tom Hanks, (still not speaking to him, by the way,) from the end of Big. (given that said movie didn’t hit the screen until 1988,  this is yet another flick that obviously stole a scenario from my life… Damn, I should be wealthy off the residuals by this point…)

Back to the story again…

Anyhow, in my way of thinking, there was no real reason to worry about my oversized Sunday go to meetin’ suit. Why? Because E K happens to be an A1 seamstress, and I knew it. In fact, she used to make all her own clothes and had even considered making her wedding dress, had there been enough time between all the rehabbing, cleaning, running around, working, cooking, etc… (obviously there wasn’t… enough time, that is… hence the whole Kmart® dress thing… but like I said, she was flat out gorgeous anyway, off the rack  Kmart® togs or not…)

But, as we well know, my way of thinking isn’t always on the same page as the rest of the world’s, and in particular, E K’s… You see, I don’t sew. I mean, I can darn a sock, but when I once tried to really, really sew something clothing wise with actual sleeves and such, it pretty much came out as a misshapen pile of fabric with random threads hanging all over it. Therefore, it hadn’t occurred to me that there was no time to actually hem the pants, tack up the jacket’s sleeves, etc.

Of course, my dear E K knew this, and simply patted me on the head with a sad look of pity in her eyes. Still, we had a wedding on the near horizon, so she continued on undaunted without threading a single needle. She went to the toolbox, pulled out a roll of double stick tape, warmed up the iron so she could make a few creases, and there you go… Taped and tailored… Just like downtown.

And, you know what? That suit was still hemmed and altered with double stick tape when I finally gave it away to Goodwill, and it looked just fine. (Yeah, I finally gave it away, very recently, in fact. Yes, there was some sentimental attachment there, but it was no longer in style and I would never fit into it again, no matter what. I can only lose just so much weight…)

So… there we were. I had a suit, E K had a dress, the food was just about done, and we even had some fancy luminaries E K had made to line the sidewalk and porch. All systems were go, people would be arriving soon, and the clock was ticking as it counted down to the climactic zero-hour…

You know, I wonder if those wingnuts over at “24” stole that one from me too…

More to come…

Murv

… NEXT: Mahwage: Clink! Clank! Oh, Murv!