Dean Allen – on his mother’s wedding.
Vancouver, B.C.
November 27, 2000
Dear Dad,
So Mom got married yesterday. It was in a park, amid some lurid autumn trees. The ceremony was performed with the river and the mountains in the background, and the whole affair was small, and nice, and stress-free. Unforced.
For the week leading up to it I was in a lousy mood. I was having trouble being any good at anything, and it all seemed glum. I couldn’t be bothered to prepare for the wedding (usually, if an event is coming up, with family or people I haven’t seen in a while, I try to gather up some material beforehand: bits of biography for the what’ve-you-been-up-tos, jokes, etc., but at Mom’s wedding I might as well have walked in, in a rented tuxedo, by mistake). Waking up yesterday I did something that happens now and again when things just aren’t going well: I opened my eyes and said, “Not this again.”
Of course it had something to do with seeing my brother. We hadn’t spoken since the disaster last December, the unpleasantness at a family dinner at a Chinese restaurant. I’d been in the midst of some serious money trouble, and I spent two hours unloading on a dumbstruck table of relatives – upstanding businesspeople all – my opinion that everything they liked was garbage, and generally being a real charmer. I didn’t know how bad it was until the next morning, when my brother called with accusations and threats, which you remember bloomed into the row that cancelled Christmas. That it happened stings; the pure gracelessness with which I dealt with it stings more.
On the way to the wedding, I rode beside my brother in the back seat of our uncle’s ludicrous German lifestyle signifier, with a thrumming hangover, feeling conspicuously dateless, sweating in a rented tuxedo, talking too much. Somewhere near the Oak Street bridge I began sharing my thoughts on why I don’t like weddings. I’m all for people declaring official partnership, in the eyes of the law or whatever, but this deal where the validity of the union is measured by the lavishness of the party and the carats of the diamond and the vintage of the champagne is insane. Whenever I participate in a wedding I’m usually deathly afraid of fucking up someone’s big day; I realized, almost too late, that one pretty good way to do that would be to drone on and on about the wedding industry.
It was warm and threatening rain all day, and so humid. Perfect weather for maximum hothouse effect in a polyblend tux. I wandered about beforehand, sweating, feeling vaguely ridiculous, trying to remember the names of old neighbours as they pumped my hand. Grinning people asked what was going on with me, and I kept drawing a blank. I had a courteous strategy discussion with dear brother on guest arrangement, speech timing, and limousine doors.
The dapper groom, sprightly at sixty-five, was ready to go. I like him, despite the accent (which, I believe, has gotten a little stronger each year since he arrived as a young man from England), and his habit of taking half an hour to tell stories really only deserving a minute or two.
When the limo arrived, and the first round of pictures was complete, we escorted Mom to her place. The guests were arranged, and we assembled in a row on the riverbank. It seemed like everyone there was either videotaping or photographing. Whenever I see these sort of pictures after the fact, I can remember smiling, trying to look genuinely happy to be there, but I’m always wearing this expression of sort of bemused disappointment. Through the ceremony I stood, not knowing where to let my eyes fall, shifting weight from foot to foot, wondering if I should clasp my hands in front of my genitals or behind my back.
And then I don’t know where it came from, but something lurched inside me, my head cleared, and I stopped thinking about myself.
I looked at all the people facing us, sort of a map of my early life – grinning, sniffling – and I had one of those grainy, super-8, life flashing before your eyes movies scroll by as I watched Mom, who looked so happy, get married for a second time. I saw her mother, making Mom pay her entire life for being conceived out of wedlock, that cruel, bitter old grandmother of mine who called her cheap and common and made her raise her sisters and brother, and who seemed to be looming everywhere in her life until she died; I saw the tall, dorky, uncertain teenager who married the first person she slept with (sorry Dad), and found herself with two demanding boys and a volatile husband with a chip on his shoulder (sorry Dad) in her early twenties; I thought of the fights you used to have that seemed to go on forever, both of you stressed out from work and the mortgage and trying to live the life you thought you were supposed to live.
The ceremony was over and hands were being shaken and I was hugging Mom, and we were looking at each other and crying. My mother, almost sixty years old, having what I was too dense to recognize until that moment: a day that was just for her.
Traffic was held back with a huge ribbon of white chiffon as we proceeded along the road to the reception. Everyone was blowing bubbles – rice is bad for the birds, I learned – and laughing or dealing with snotty tears. The dapper groom’s granddaughters, three little fountains of curly hair in matching dresses, were darting around with flower baskets. I felt oddly unselfconscious and giddy.
Later on we had an evening like the ones I remember best from childhood, with aunts and uncles and cousins getting loud and telling jokes and singing. The guitars even came out, and Mom’s brother played some of the Bob Dylan and Van Morrison songs he used to. At one point toward the end of the evening I was full of scotch and sort of aimlessly attempting a Foo Fighters song on a guitar. I looked up and saw my brother, playing air drums.
Love,
Dean
