Wedding Bells-Check Your Morals at the Door

Sherman and I decided to get married pretty quickly after my recent proposal to the polar bear that ran away with my heart. Most people that think they are in the know of my life were of the opinion that this was because I was pregnant and against having a bastard love-child with what my incarcerated grandmother refers to as “my man”.

This is obviously wrong on so many levels. For one, just because I have put on a little bit of weight around my mid-section does not mean I am retaining water. For two, I am against the use of shot-guns in any circumstance, especially in their use as a threat to coerce the procurer of the seed-of-life into marrying the carrier of his imminent offspring. For three, this allusion of the “shot-gun wedding” implies that the father of the bride is motivated—and intelligent—enough to load a shot-gun, drive to the potential husband’s house and force him to wed the bride under duress. My lesbian father sucks at both loading guns and following driving directions. He also lacks the motivation to put together a plan that involves moving farther than his fridge.

What I am getting at is that Sherman and I settled on all the details pertaining to our wedding on our own. It will be important for us to remember that we got ourselves into this mess, as we remember the details of the event with the aid of Ritalin fondly.

Part of why we decided to maneuver for a quick wedding was the hope that most people wouldn’t have time to get over the initial shock that accompanies such an announcement, and move on to the  reaction my mother had. “Someone is dumb enough to marry you, Scott Mainprize? Don’t let that bitch go!”

There was also the hope that the “mesmerizing” members of my family would not have a chance to meet the fairly well-adjusted members of Sherman’s family with enough time to vocally challenge Sherman on whether or not he really wants to co-mingle genes with the kind of people that led to the official criminalization of inbreeding. Again, this was both a valiant attempt and epic fail for Sherman and me.

“Fuckin’ right we’re havin’ a rehearsal dinner,” Sheryl, my grandmother who had recently been incarcerated for tax evasion in her effort to teach the government a good, old fashioned, life lesson, informed me with her one phone call of the week. “Otherwise, they won’t give me a full weekend pass.”

“I was kind of hoping they wouldn’t even give you a full day pass,” I replied, but the reception from the Arctic Circle is too grainy and she didn’t hear me. Besides, in spite of both herself, and her extra X chromosome, Sheryl and Sherman have really hit it off. She would totally go for stealing the plot of The Graduate to spend a pre-marriage summer fornicating with “my man”, which is just another incentive to getting these shenanigans dealt with as soon as possible.

“I’ll fuckin’ be there,” Sheryl replied with enough hostility to make me believe it. “And don’t go booking some transvestite to over-see the wedding. I have that diploma your grandfather bought for me on-line and I know how to use it.”

“That’s what I was afraid of,” I sighed, hanging up the phone in an effort to cut the conversation short.

“But Scott!!! You’ll need to get it done at city-hall first if you want it to be legal…” Sheryl trailed off as the dial-tone brought me back to temporary sanity.

Not wanting to be out-done by my family, I was aware that most of my friends would also be in attendance at this festive occasion. No fucking way I’d miss that shit for the world! was the response written-in over the crossed out will attend part of the few RSVP slips I didn’t pretend had been lost in the mail. These responses were complemented with Make room for my caravan in lou of the ignored book accommodations option.

“I guess we are going to have to do this on a beach somewhere,” I confided to Sherman. “I hope that isn’t going to be a problem.”

“That’s probably best,” he responded in between puffs of his pipe. “In fact, If we can get it booked somewhere in the deep woods maybe people will get lost on the way.”

“I like the way you think, lover,” I laughed. Sherman was taking this all in stride though. I can’t imagine time will do me justice, and with each new revelation about this process he seems to be more self-assured in his initial snap-decision to say yes to all of this. Besides, with the onslaught of global warming he decided we would probably be best served in relocating after the honeymoon. He was thinking a return to the south. I was thinking Kuwait.

The night of the rehearsal dinner was clearly going to be a bust. My father needed a tranquilizer just to pick out an outfit. “You’ll look ridiculous in anything you wear,” Sheryl told him, as she sucked the life out of her first bottle of tequila since her incarceration. “I wouldn’t sweat it if I were you.”

“But you aren’t me mother!” he screamed like a banshee might if it were in a bad mood. “You never were me and you never try to understand me!”

“Pull yourself together,” Sheryl snarled, slapping him in the face. “Can’t you think about anyone but yourself? I have to officiate this monstrosity!”

“Granny, you demanded to officiate this monstrosity,” I responded. What a Beelzebub.

“Potatoe—potato,” she replied, as though this made any sense, as she tried to slam her empty bottle down on the table, but missed, dropping it into the recycling bin. “Where’s the open bar, damn it!”

“There is no open bar,” I said through clenched teeth. “You don’t get an open bar at a rehearsal dinner. In fact, you don’t even get an open bar at the reception. Your ankle-bracelet will light up if you go over 0.8.”

“Scott, cut an old-woman a break,” Sheryl heaved, as she flopped into a chair that exchanged quarters for happy-endings. “If you want to know a story of woe, ask me about my life.”

“Okay, what’s going on with your life,” I asked, realizing that, having been caught-up in the hubbub of my own life recently, it was entirely possible that I had been somewhat negligent in attending to the people I love the most.

 “Rent OZ,” she snapped. “Now pass me some gin.”

I had made the mistake of letting my friend Miranda arrange the seating for this event. I had assumed that since she had recently gone through her own nuptules, she would be more empathetic than most. However, I had not factored-in her having gone through her even more recent divorce, or her new “burn-baby-burn” life mantra. Basically, the bitch fucked me over by separating my relatives and pairing them off with Sherman’s, under the pretext of “letting everyone get to know each other with enough time to draw some necessary conclusions.”

“Those being?” I had asked.

“This wedding needs more vodka.”

I don’t remember much about the evening, or the meal for that matter, since I didn’t get to eat it. Miranda had thoughtfully chosen duck as an entrée. Since both Sherman and I are vegetarians, she thought this would be funny. Sheryl—by now fully inebriated and with an ankle bracelet that was flashing five shades of red—thought this was hilarious.

On top of this, Miranda had seated me next to Sheryl’s second-cousin, Vernon, who is a parishioner of some sort. Why he had been invited to the wedding I don’t know, but upon questioning my grandmother she just flung a disc of OZ, season three, in my face and told me to “deal with it”. Interestingly enough, this was also her game-plan for an introduction during the ceremony.

Vernon wasn’t about to mince words. He had clearly spent his life indulging in two things that I had very little knowledge of: Ronald Reagan’s inspirational quotes and Sambuca. Neither of which I had a fucking clue about. “Do you have any morals at all?” he asked, as what I can only assume was his idea of an ice-breaker.

To be honest, I don’t think it’s a question of morality, or morals, at all. Morals are like opinions; in that everyone has them. They are just different from one person to the next. Morals also seem like opinions in the sense that everyone believes theirs are the right ones. If your opinion wasn’t right to you, you wouldn’t have it—or you are pretty stupid. Morals are the same way. However, I wasn’t prepared to make this argument in the midst of my very own shit-show wedding.

Fortunately, Sheryl had my back on this. She also appeared to have outstanding hearing, considering she was stationed on the other side of the room, next to Sherman.

“Grow the fuck up Vernon-Mc-Learnon,” she hollered, whipping disc one from OZ season four at him. “Don’t think you are ruining my special day with your biblical bullshit.”

It’s interesting the way people show their affections for you. It’s never how you would have hoped or, how it all plays out in your head, but when it happens for real, it seems all the more magical.

Sheryl crossed religious--and state--lines to be a part of the wedding of her openly gay grandson and his polar bear of a lover. Well, also for the gin. Mostly for the gin. My lesbian father pulled his personal shit together for one day too (not that one, but a previously negotiated November afternoon in the year 2015) and Sherman’s family agreed that my family’s genetic inferiority was “endearing”—a sentiment they have universal stuck by in spite of their intellect and summer vacations with my blood-line on a time-share we all have keys to in the South-Pacific.

But reflecting on the year that was, I learned something (other than how to live in a land with an average temperature of fifty-three below). I learned that there's really only one thing worth caring about. That somewhere along the snow trail of life we all realize that it isn't the things we create, or where we've been, or even what we do. It's the people we let into our story. The ones who moved our mountains and let us move theirs.

I think the luckiest people around are the ones who realize that early enough in life to live that way. The ones who learn that making the extra effort for the people they love is really no effort at all, but the very--the only--reason any of us are here. And that the one regret more hollow than anything else I can imagine is to realize that too late; or even worse, to never realize it at all.

That’s it. That's us. That’s the Year of the Bear. Hibernation’s in session, y’all!