I had spent the past few weeks living in my in-law’s basement. It would soon be my home - our apartment downstairs. When families left respective homes in Wisconsin and Indiana to meet in Wilmette, IL... I travelled south towards... not with... Clan Black. It was the beginning of the future.
Together we prepped the reception hall and went to dinner as a two-family meet and greet. My nephew Caspian was crying at dinner so I walked him around the block in a stroller... a prelude to the responsible, full-grown man that I figured I had to be. “I’ve got it. I’ll handle it. Let’s go outside Caspian.” We came together as families. Our corporal selves met somewhere near the physical middle of respective homes, mirroring the marriage that would follow.
My family stayed together in a family friend’s spare house that night. I don’t recall whose house or what street it was on exactly, but it was near(ish) to the Baha’i temple. My eldest sister had split from her husband at some point previous... so in a way, despite the addition of my nephews, that night was the end of an era renewed. We were together as the distinct family unit of my childhood for the last time.
This world moves ever-forward. All things are eventually lost to time by simple definition of existence, yet willingly giving up that which represented my first memories and greatest, most innocent joys was hard. My family has long since splintered to the Carolinas and North Dakota by way of New Orleans, but it was my own separation from them that caused a wound that will never heal. We all carry scars of one sort of another.
I don’t recall being nervous or questioning my decision, but I experienced something akin to pre-emptive nostalgia. I didn’t dread sleep that final night so much as I had trouble letting go of the family I had known. More than just physical location and the finality of my life’s relocation to Wisconsin, I knew that things would never be the same after I went to bed.
It’s all a bittersweet haze, but I remember my sister warming her voice in the bathroom early the next morning and how it filled the house with prayer.
We made our way over to the reception hall where final preparations were being made and Shelly was trying to finish her own wedding cake. It was the first of many times since that she proved to be a woman capable of anything... including choosing to do too much. She had partially iced the cake the night before and was trying to finish it with a smooth coat that seemed to be as impossible to achieve as my holding onto the moments of that last night had been. Shelly was getting frustrated on her wedding day morning.
In the type of wisdom which can only be borne of true and complete ignorance, my smirking twenty year old self introduced levity to the moment by swiping a finger through the icing that she couldn’t perfect. I popped the iced finger in my mouth, dodging the half-hearted slap she threw my way. I would have disarmed her with my best smile, too, had it not been for the nasty garlic flavor that was punching my tongue.
As it turns out, a particularly garlic-heavy potato salad had been stored in the fridge over-night... more or less directly under the nearly-finished wedding cake. The flavor had absorbed into the icing and my pestering of the cook had saved the day. Shelly proved for the second time that she was capable of anything. She scraped the cake clean, made a new batch of icing and started over on her own wedding cake just hours before the ceremony.
The lake weather was cold that day, but Shelly managed to suffer through the ceremony in the pink dress that gave her grandmother nightmares. The answer to‘Who gets married in a non-white dress?’ is: Awesome women, capable of rising above nonsense stereotypes and preconceived ideas. We had put together a pretty non-standard wedding, though not entirely in the way we had initially planned.
For my part, I got married in an un-ironed pair of slacks, shoes, and a shirt from Walmart. The tie was from Walgreens. We had a piñata and a potluck at our reception. At one point we were going to send out postcards as wedding invites, but that idea was squished by family. We were married in a garden at the Baha’i Temple which has since been entirely redesigned. The only video we have of the ceremony itself is half-crooked because cameras were discouraged as a means of emphasizing the spiritual portion of the ceremony, so a friend discreetly left his running but didn’t look at it.
We had planned the ceremony out together but had never really discussed how things would start. There was no preacher, no central figure to organize things. After about 15 minutes I just started talking and eventually everyone shut up. When it came time to say our vows, I went first. I took some time to collect myself and commit to the words. As I’ve been told since, that pause wasn’t as short as it seemed and it made certain others nervous. As I’ve personally decided since, that pause was exactly as long as it needed to be.
We privately exchanged rings inside the temple, giddy and nervous despite the seriousness. As we took photos in the garden... sometimes with the people we expected... sometimes not... others headed to the reception. There was little to do at the reception, but we kept busy doing it. I remember only a few things.
In my opinion a marriage is between the two people and God. The big ceremony and reception are for family and unity. It was important for us to have a wedding that featured and was geared towards children instead of excluding them. I definitely remember getting the piñata going and my nephew’s ill-fated rescue attempt of Sponge Bob. The only other strong memories I have are of fretting over music, slow dancing in front of what felt like a million-billion judging eyes and stealing off to a back room to unwrap gifts and cards so that we could get our finances together for the road trip we were to embark on immediately following the reception.
I still have issues with dancing and/or, really, doing anything in public until I feel like I know what I’m doing.
We drove away from the reception in my wife’s red Pontiac Bonneville feeling somewhat like the couple looked at the end of The Graduate. Up until that point we’d known what to expect and we had things to do and were busy. We’d never really known what all to do after it was all done. That sort of ‘being’ not ‘doing’ felt unnatural.
Off we went on an adventure. The rest of that night is nobody’s business, but we’d waited and that still makes me happy. We had Mexican of some sort for dinner.
We had a generic route through Colorado mapped out but had no set stopping points. We listened to music the whole way and dreamed of our future. I still listen to the same music to this day, though less often... and whenever I do, I’m transported back to that red Pontiac Bonneville heading west and looking at my wife sleeping as I drove.
We got an oil change somewhere along the way and they cut our brake lines. I couldn’t stop in the slightest as I pulled away. An older me would have gotten angry. A younger me half-believed them when they said it must have been a coincidence that the breaks went out right then and we were lucky it wasn’t on a mountain... half-believed and half just wanted to move on with life.
My brain sponge has retained many memories of our honeymoon - from Shelly getting cat-called in a Denver hotel parking lot, to trying to climb a path up a mountain and getting passed by old ladies with canes as we took a much needed break, to driving to the top of a mountain where we were about the clouds and it was hot but there was still snow on the ground. All in all, the things I remember the most are the unplanned moments both good and bad. Honeymoons are much like life in that way.
Life is not made up of moments. It is made up of the many brightly colored details hiding in everyday activities that highlight joy and pain and sorrow and exhilaration like the pulsing of the heart cycling blood through the body.
The place we were most excited to visit on our honeymoon was Arches National Park. Once there, however, we got overheated and sun-squinted ourselves to insane headaches. The phallic rock formation was funny but otherwise we were ready to go back to lusher, greener, climates.
We got directions to a swimming hole from a hotel worker near Arches and planned to stop there on our way out of town. We got lost a few times but finally found it... then chickened out and didn’t go. We would have had to leave our car and venture off down a path that went, we assumed but didn’t know for sure, to a mountain spring. Something about that felt a little too similar to the beginning of a poorly written horror movie and at the very least we didn’t want our car stolen or broken into.
We didn’t own digital cameras and took a lot of pictures. We don’t really have the negatives anymore, but the only pictures that never worked out were the ones from Arches... mainly because we apparently didn’t load any film. Back then you didn’t know that there was no film inside a camera until you got to the end of where a roll was supposed to be and the “film” kept advancing anyway. The closest thing we have is a picture I took (with another camera) of Shelly taking a picture of a flower. Utah sucked in general. We went back to Colorado on highway 666, I think, and saw some pretty gigantic dust devils along the way.
We had planned to camp the entire trip, but stayed in hotels far more often. The one time we truly camped was when we stopped near Mesa Verde. We took a bumpy dirt road back to a campsite so wild that when we woke up early in the morning it wasn’t a passionate imagination that had me thinking about wild horses... it was actual wild horses running around our tent. We lost, then found a hubcap on that damn bumpy road.
At Mesa Verde we ate an entire watermelon in one sitting. Among other things, Utah was a dehydrating climate. I liked Mesa Verde, though it felt like a museum and I don’t like museums as much as nature.
We were too young to rent hotels at the tender ages of twenty, so we’d usually pick a stopping place and call ahead. Before the advent of smart-phones, this meant stopping at visitor centers and picking up coupon magazines. I’d use a man-voice when I called hotels and made sure to mention my wife... then I pre-paid with a credit card. By the time we showed up, nobody asked questions. This worked like a charm until Durango.
We had a nice dinner in Durango and discussed how we could envision living there someday, then we had to go to about four different hotels before anyone would let us reserve a room. Despite that we were adults, could pay and had our marriage license as proof... we were “too young.” Age limits like that are quite possibly the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard of.
I think it was at the hotel that finally gave us a room in Durango when I thought my arm would have to be amputated. We were still getting used to the mechanics of sharing a bed and Shelly’s head cut off the circulation in my arm while I slept. I don’t know how long it took for my arm to ‘wake up’ the next morning but I was legitimately scared. We left the next morning for New Mexico. It was on another night in another town that a sleepy, disoriented Shelly was nearly scared to death by the strange man in her bed. As it turned out he was pretty handsome, so she calmed down.
We arrived in the Taos, New Mexico area after about a week on the road. We’d arrived just in time for a motorcycle rally somewhere nearby. I called just about every hotel in town before yet another full hotel suggested that I give the ski valley a try. The Taos ski valley hotels start opening up in late May and we found a place with rooms available. It was about a half hour outside town.
We had planned on continuing our journey, but the Inn at Snakedance ended up being an amazing find. They gave us amazing free breakfast of the freshest fruit I could imagine, cost less than many hotels and were just the right brand of rustic and comfort for us. After a week on the road, I think we were ready to settle in and relax. We didn’t leave until it was time to go home. When they heard we were on our honeymoon we got an upgraded room with a front viewing window. We might have even extended our stay for a few days beyond what we’d planned for our honeymoon.
We had our first true argument before we left the Inn at Snakedance. We’d decided to hike down the mountain but this proved a far more taxing endeavor than expected – and there was still the hike back up the mountain to account for. Exhaustion caught us by surprise about a mile down the mountain. Bickering began, but didn’t really get going until we found a soda machine in the parking lot of a closed up hotel. I was tired and thirsty and the idea of a cold soda was a glorious prospect... until the machine turned out to be broken. That was an unhappy moment and all I know is that an angry woman definitely climbs mountains faster than a man in mourning over a Dr. Pepper.
That night we reconciled at the restaurant just in front of the Inn. I still dream about the Green Chili Soup I had there. It has never been matched. I like to think it was that night that I made Shelly laugh so hard she peed in the bed. I did make her laugh until she peed, but I don’t remember where we were.
Leaving there felt as sad the end of a honeymoon should feel, though we still had to drive back home. I’ve always wanted to return to the Inn at Snakedance, but we never have. Maybe on another anniversary we will go there again.
Our honeymoon ended a long time ago but we’re still on that adventure. It’s our tenth anniversary and we’ve got no plans but to follow the wind as it blows swirling down life street. Life is a choose-your-own-adventure book and I’ve loved every minute of this one. I hope not to reach the last page for many more years.
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