Valentine for Marcia
I make my living creating and conducting wedding ceremonies.
As the marriage officiant, I usually begin by assuring the gathered family and
friends of their importance in the lives of the bride and groom. I tell them in
my welcoming that “although the day belongs to the bride and groom, it is also
a tribute to all of you. For knowing you and interacting with you has helped to
make the bride and groom who they needed to be in order to find each other and
to find love.” I also generally entice both the bride and groom to secretly
write love letters to each other for the purpose of creating a little mystery,
for all true human ritual requires mystery as an element. So in keeping with
the notion of a wedding or Valentine love letter written in secret to be shared
with guests on the special day, this love letter, this story is for Marcia, all
of you, and everyone who’s played a part in the story of Marcia and Eddie. In
truth, the ingredients that go into the solution of anyone’s love-quest are
many: the quirky twists of fate, the circumstances of time and place, the
happenstance of accidental match makers, the players from both one’s inner and
outer circles, the unexplained coincidences, and the act of seizing
opportunity. My thirty-four year old marriage to Marcia, its beginnings,
involved more serendipity and luck than winning the lotto. It also involved a
wedding at which I was a last minute guest.
My biological clock was ticking. Above the clickity clack of
dice skittering across backgammon boards in nightclubs, above the roar of an
electric Bob Dylan on the stereo blasted through Advent speakers that filled my
bachelor’s abode, just outside the psychedelic musings of LSD inspired cosmic
starry symphonies composed on camping trips, through the sound barrier of fogs
engendered by Heineken and Grand Marnier excessively imbibed (most days),
beyond the orgasmic, satiated murmurings of the many women with whom I was
involved, louder than the pounding beat of powder up my nose, there was a sorry
sad song singing itself always on my auditory periphery, the dirge of a
childless future. All my lovers were great companions, and more than one I
could envision as wife, but none seemed right to be the mother of my children.
The Irish in me disliked the thought of buying into a song of no progeny, and
hence, no matter how happy or stoned or drunk or sober or sexually content I
was, I was always aware that I was yet to find my mate, my anima.
Earlier I mentioned camping trips, as camping is the one of
the principal reasons I live in Colorado. I had spent the summer of 1974
hitchhiking the West and had spent a couple of weeks camping at Rabbit Ears
Pass and the Strawberry Park hot springs outside Steamboat. I had the time of
my life and vowed upon my return to Philadelphia at summer’s end to return
someday to Colorado and set up camp for good. Camping, in a very round about
way, also helped bring Marcia to me.
Two months prior to meeting Marcia I had gone camping with a
good friend, his girlfriend, a girlfriend of hers, and three dogs, in my 1974
Dodge Tradesman van. On I-70 barreling down Floyd Hill on our way west, the
pistons of my 225 cubic inch slant six engine overheated and the engine block
cracked, because, as it was revealed, the oil reservoir was bone dry. You see,
because I owned a van and was part of the twenty-something generation of
Capitol Hill denizens who often moved from apartment to apartment, people were
always asking me if I and my van would help them move. Lugging couches and beds
and such up and down the stairs of low rent Denver walk-ups was not something I
enjoyed spending my free time on, and so I had devised a response to those who
asked for my help that was both selfish and helpful. “You can borrow my van but
not me. Just return it with a full tank of gas, and it’s yours.” The first two
years I was in Denver I probably loaned my van to a couple dozen friends and
friends of friends to enable them to move. Unfortunately I never realized that
hauling apartment furniture in my van consumed more oil than normal. And I had not required that the van be full of oil as well as gas
upon its return. And in the week prior to the demise of my engine, a former
roommate had moved a house full of possessions, including a disassembled baby
grand piano to Evergreen Colorado. He’d made five separate trips up the hills
to Evergreen, all with excessive, oil consuming loads.
After aborting the camping trip with my friend, the women
and the dogs, I had my van towed home and it sat in my garage for months. I
took up bicycling, taxis and buses. I would need a thousand dollars for the
installation of a rebuilt engine. Thankfully, as it turns out, I did not have a
thousand dollars because my lack of a vehicle was a pivotal step in putting
Marcia and I together. Who would have thought that the lack of oil would grease
the tracks to love?
A casual acquaintance, a cocktail waitress where I worked,
approached me after her shift one evening. “Ed,” she said, “I understand you
are an artist. I’ve seen the Isis you painted on the glass of your Pearl Street
front door. You might not know it, but I live but one block north of you. So I
have a favor to ask. I’m getting married in three days up in the Genesee
foothills and I’m hoping that one, you might attend my wedding, and two, you
might create a Just Married sign for our
car. The wedding is Sunday morning and the afternoon reception will be right
upstairs in Brooks Tower. So, even if you have to work Sunday night, you could
make it.” Now as I said, I was merely a casual acquaintance of my inquisitor, a
woman some ten years my junior. But always on the look out for adventure, with
the thought of meeting some one new, I answered my co-worker’s query somewhat
outrageously. “Barbara,” I said, “I’d love to attend your wedding and paint you
a sign. But my busted down van sits in my garage, three hundred dollars shy of
repair, and I have no way of getting to the mountains. But surely, you must
have a beautiful woman friend who might give me a ride. If so, I’ll dust off my
acrylics and paint a sign announcing your soon-to-be new status: JUST MARRIED."
Well, Saturday late nights in the life of a twenty-nine year
old bachelor getting off work can easily involve excess. And on the eve of
Barbara’s wedding, mine did. A midnight hour plus at The Lift in Glendale was
followed by a couple more hours at Muddy’s in The Highlands. Thankfully I had
painted Barbara’s sign on Saturday morning. So when Sunday morning came, quite
unintentionally, I overslept even though the day was to involve a blind date
with Barbara’s friend, a college student attending The University of Wyoming in
Laramie, name of Marcia who Barbara assured me was charming. I was exceedingly
hung over and showering when I barely hear the do-ray-me of my doorbell chimes
over Bob Dylan singing “I married Isis on the fifth day of May.” Out of the
shower I practically stumble and throw a threadbare bath towel around my waist,
hoping to exploit the sexual charge that is germane to the day of a wedding.
Through the translucent painting of Isis that adorns the beveled glass of my
front door I see my date for the day, Marcia, and immediately I wish my
faculties weren’t so fuzzy.
“Come in. Sorry I’m not ready,” I mumble as I gesture for her
to enter. “Give me a few minutes to shave and dress. I hope you like Dylan
‘cause that’s what’s stacked five high on the turntable. All I ever listen to.
Oh, and if you like, there’s some pot on the dining room table. Roll yourself a
joint.”
While showering and dressing I look in the mirror but my
memory of the woman in the other room is what fills my visual cortex. Blue
eyes, light brown hair, a smile as welcoming as my mother’s. A body to lie for.
A look in her eyes, a sparkle, to die for. And when I join her in the dining
room her catalogue of charms only gets better when she tells me, “I, too, love
Bob Dylan, and here’s what I prepared for the day,” as she hands me six
perfectly hand rolled joints. My entire consciousness smiles at her tastes for
Dylan and intoxicants. And later my hangover disappears completely when, on the
way to Genesee, she suggests I eat some of the Brownies she’s made for the
potluck reception. The fiber is Michoacan. The chocolate: Girardelli. The
pecans are from Georgia.
Well, it’s a pretty happy Eddie who spends the day with
Marcia. Many are the gentlemen at the wedding and the reception that follows
who have an interest in my blind date, especially when they are informed of her
baker’s skills. She invites many to partake of the joints she rolled for me.
Marcia and the bride’s brother, Robert, seem to know each other well and I’m
hoping not intimately. He has no trouble putting his arm around her when
everyone is posing for photos after the ceremony. I realize that of all the
subjects of our conversation on the ride up, her status (in a relationship or
not) was not one of them.
Not one to put all my eggs in one basket I half-heartedly
interact with other women after the wedding ceremony. Barbara has a couple
unattached sisters from both the East and West coast who are closer in age to
me, but I have already buried my heart in Laramie. Thankfully, when it’s time
to depart the ceremony, Marcia distances herself from Robert and the other
young bachelors sniffing around, and takes my hand as we head back to her Pinto
for the return trip to Denver. I cannot remember when holding a woman’s hand
was as exciting. I hope this gesture is as meaningful as it is casual, that it
is not to just gain better purchase on the rocky trail we walk.
Back in Denver at the reception, again I am faced with
competition for Marcia’s hand. Many men ask her to dance and she dances with a
knowledge of country dancing that frightens the 60s dancer in me. I never could lead like Robert leads her,
but I could Bristol Stomp, slop, mash potato, and free style with the best of
the best; Hell, when I was sixteen I was chosen to dance on stage at the
Concord Roller Ring in Philadelphia as fourteen year old Little Stevie
Wonder played his Motown rhythm and
blues hits Fingertips and Uptight
(Everything is Alright). But leading a woman at country two-step swing was
out of my comfort zone.
When it was time for me to go to work downstairs at The
Boston Half Shell, I was thinking about calling in sick, for fear that Marcia
might end up dancing the night away. But when I told her I had to leave she
asked me to escort her to her car as she had to drive back to Laramie. She had
school in the morning. Before getting in her car, she bussed my cheek with a
quick kiss and whispered something along the lines of “If you’re ever in
Laramie, come play with me. Here’s my address.” To be truthful I had no idea
where Laramie was, other than somewhere in Wyoming, and my van was a month or
two away from being repaired. Not knowing how long the window to “come play
with me” would be open, that evening at work I arranged with the relief waiter
to cover my shifts for the next five days. In the morning I hitchhiked 155
miles from my South Pearl Street home in Washington Park to Marcia’s student
apartment in Laramie. It was the longest ten hours of my life, involving the
good will of a half dozen drivers whose names I never knew or don’t remember
but whose kindness played an essential part in my thirty-four year old
marriage, ten hours that ended with me spending my first night with my mate. A
mate I found because I painted Isis on my front door, because I freely loaned
my van to friends, and because I did not have the money to fix a vehicle.
Because a co-worker played matchmaker. Because I wanted kids and the moment I
met Marcia I saw the Madonna within. Had I contact info for the people who
originally turned me on to the Strawberry Park hot springs, and to the short
term, long forgotten friends on Capitol Hill who borrowed my van and did not
check the oil level, and for my benefactors who offered me rides on my way to
Laramie that September Monday morning in 1977, I most surely would have invited
them to my wedding in 1979, at which, coincidentally enough, like at the moment
I met Marcia, I was shirtless. Similarly, I would share with them tonight this
ritual love letter that I’ve written. For without them I might not have been
able to find love, to find Marcia.
