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| French Gloss |
Years ago, I married a boy from the first college I attended, an upstate SUNY school for teachers, mostly because he needed someone to take care of him, and his parents were exhausted. When an opportunity presented itself as a gap after I dumped my longtime boyfriend from school (who wanted to lock me into a life of servitude to him, in order to feed his ego), my friend grabbed at the chance to romance me, in a wildly showy display of affection, love, and devotion that was planned and executed during one of his visits to the city. I bought into it, because our group of friends loved him dearly, despite his alcoholism and ineptitude.
I wanted to stop the process many times, but once I was strapped to the marriage train, it was designed to move forward despite any protests: down payments were made, contracts were signed, classes were attended, supplies were ordered, etc. If you've ever been hurried down the altar, you know the effect I'm describing. Think of your high school friends' peer pressure to try a cigarette multiplied by a thousand. To get out of the dread and misgivings I had, I would have had to create my own staged scene as a runaway bride, not something my family relied on me to do. I carry through, as always. And so we had a ceremony, not of my choosing, but for the family.
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| Whitemore, Boston. |
On my wedding day, just in case I missed every cue they gave me beforehand, the groom's father told me in a dramatic aside, "He's your problem, now", imposing his big presence upon me before leaving to get drunk, to later ride in their rented party bus back upstate. Despite his parents' obvious weaknesses, or maybe because of their gross needs that so matched my own family's, my father-in-law liked me very much. When we moved into a beautiful historic brownstone in Brooklyn with our very own garden, the garrulous, handsome old man (friends called him "The Captain", and I dubbed him "The Silver Fox") collected old bottles for me to place in the windows in a kaleidoscope fashion that matched the period of the place, once he discovered my taste for them. "Oh, I see those every time I go out on a job!", in reference to his plush union gig with an upstate utility company. Years ago, his family changed their definitively Polish name to a shorter, more Irish sounding one, so his grandfather would have a better fit to the trades. It was ironic to me, because after we were married, I had a cousin of Jewish/Irish descent in Brooklyn who took the exact same surname to mask his mixed ethnicity, a hiding-in-plain-sight maneuver if ever there was one.
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| Freedom, in a jar. |
I still have some of the old glass bottles that were the apothecary and grocer staples of the day, holding everything from medicines, elixirs, hair gels, paint varnishes, to booze and the modern equivalent of snake oil cures. Like the ceramic pipes of their day, they were (and are) everywhere in the Northeast, in this very historic area that forms the original "Thirteen Colonies". I still think of my old ex-father-in-law whenever I use one, as the best part of that entire deal from beginning to end; a travesty that I can (and mostly likely, will) have annulled, as a standing example to me about the essence of duplicity, because, dear reader, in one last, finely executed move, this cornered Catholic girl had an outdoor ceremony presided over by a female Methodist minister, a "Get Out of Jail" free card for this very foxy lady.
Thanks for the memories.
