חתונה מאוחרת

"Now, the worrying starts," a former co-worker had said to me. I laughed, thinking that it was impossible for a lifetime packed with largely unnecessary worry to accommodate any more.

I laughed; but the joke, as they used to oversay, was on me.

Over a year prior, Asaph and I had embarked on a monumental, yet ultimately commonplace, endeavor.

We flew to the Upper Midwest in the dead of winter.

We were surprised by the relative stylishness.

We flew to the South Atlantic.

We were stunned by the volume and congestion.

I was shocked by many things we encountered.

The number of complicated transactions was mind-boggling.

Months passed during which other major events dominated my consciousness and unconsciousness. I told my mother about the endeavor while she was still able to respond. I went back to my parents' house that night feeling happier than I had in months -- or maybe years -- even though my mother lay in the hospital dying. I marveled at how weird the human emotional experience was.

Time passed, and we became complacent about our initial success.

We flew back to the Upper Midwest, passing over Great Lakes.

I took a walk and identified some sort of blight upon the land.

We remained smug.

Back in the Northeast, I took the train to New London to see my first cousin, once removed. He only spoke Italian. I learned the word passeggino, since my first cousin, once removed, did not want to get back into his.

My father was also visiting, and we took a drive.

We stopped in the odd village of Pomfret, birthplace of my friend Darius. The main industry in the town was prestigious private preparatory education. We observed some field hockey or lacrosse or something similarly privileged.

We drove back through Rhode Island, a small disappointment.

My father, my first cousin (once removed), my first cousin, his lovely Italian wife, and I ate a dinner of which Asaph would not have approved.

We had a bit of time to run to the beach before our train back to New York.

It was a beautiful and ominous New England evening.

As my father and I took our seats in the train car, I noticed that a socially prominent non-heterosexual couple was sitting a few rows ahead of us. One member of this couple had gone through a very public break-up on a socially non-prominent networking website a few years prior. He met his new boyfriend relatively quickly, and they announced their marriage engagement with a photo of their ringed hands, clasping. Their public declarations of love reached a feverish pitch, and I had to look away, virtually.

We pretended not to see one another, actually.

Back in New York I took my father to do the new normal things.

He left without incident.

The holidays arrived.

I attended more services than in the past, but not all of them.

Coincidentally, my cousin's Italian wife's parents had flown over from Apulia and had come into New York for a visit. My cousin's affluent sister -- also my cousin -- had driven in from New Jersey to join them. Fasting, I took them around Central Park before we headed downtown to see the things that were happening and had happened.

I brought up the problem with today's headstones, a subject no one really wanted to talk about.

The next weekend Jobim and I headed by our friends in New Jersey along with many hirsute, burly, hurly and jovial non-heterosexuals. They lived in the pastoral region that was almost Pennsylvania.

We all headed to de jure Pennsylvania the next day.

We ambled around a charming town that was a bit too earthy for me.

We had brought our friends' adopted son. He was absurdly well-adjusted. Our friends were models of parenthood.

We stopped at a masculine restaurant for lunch.

We all walked around looking for candy for our friends' son.

Some of us went to a nearby town to pick up Asaph, who was coming by train from Philadelphia. The rest of the weekend passed without incident.

I had been taking a new Hebrew class, at the Jewish Community Center. It was of much better quality than my previous classes, which had devolved into tutoring. My new teacher was an Israeli baritone who humiliated the students when they made mistakes. The ages in the class ranged from 17 to 75. The 17-year-old looked like a small child, not the way 17-year-olds looked on television, where they were generally played by 29-year-olds.

We began to meet with the Recontructionist rabbi who was to perform our marriage ceremony. I liked her, because she often agreed with me more than with Asaph. She had also left me a voice message after my mother died that was so compassionate and articulate that I had been taken to tears, even though I had never met her before.

I pledged to have a Jewish household, but I could continue to practice my own religion discreetly.

We were going to have an entirely Jewish wedding. That caused no conflict. But the fact that I was a follower of the etiquette expert and philosopher Judith Martin, and had adopted her beliefs wholesale, did. Everything from the invitations, to the gift registry (a concept that made me nauseated even to think of), to the details of the reception (klezmer band or no klezmer band) caused no end of arguing. Calling off the wedding because of these relative trivialities seemed too in line with the capriciousness of the time, but I was tempted. I caved in, over and over, deciding that it would be good practice for married life with an Israeli.

Soon after we sent out the invitations, we learned that we had misunderstood the number of guests allowed by the wedding venue. We had invited twice as many as were permitted.

I looked for a parapet over which to hurl myself.

The next weekend a freak snowstorm devastated the park.

We went up to Westchester for advice and support.

The next weekend Asaph went off to do another obstacle-course competition. I had signed up but wasn't feeling well, so I stayed in New York and ambled around the park. 

I sent images to the Upper Midwest.

I had run the six-mile loop many times a week in my youth; now I was becoming a stroller.

It was difficult not to be a bit melancholic.

The passing of time and all of its crimes is making me sad again; the passing of time and all of its sickening crimes is making me sad again, I thought. Oh, smother me, Mother.

The Harlem Meer was covered with duckweed.

Walking on the water seemed plausible.

I felt bad for the dogs.

I resumed my well-trodden path.

The next day we received frightening news: news we hadn't even anticipated, although we should have. It wasn't necessarily bad news, but it was still terrifying. Now the worrying begins, I thought.

All of our plans suddenly required reevaluation.

I questioned our decisions regarding the endeavor. Had I been too easily swayed by Shakespeare's Sonnet 2? I had once been worried about the objections of the Right, but since I didn't personally know anyone with those views, they were easy to put out of mind. The objections of the Left were more salient: environmental, political, social, economic, and cultural. A "vanity project" one friend had called it. No different from "organ trafficking" had said another. I could only imagine what a friend who considered pet ownership akin to slavery would think. In fact, I didn't have to imagine, since I knew: he thought it was awful. And our marriage was largely initiated because of the endeavor -- what could be more reactionary than that? I wondered.

But soon the time could arrive when I could no longer have any doubts or hesitations about this matter. Lives would depend on it.

Someone else would have to "fuck the future". I had no energy left for fucking anyway.

Sleeping was a challenge, but we continued on our way.

Our friend Josh took our photos for a wedding announcement that would ultimately go nowhere.

Faruq suggested that I give offerings to the Egyptian goddess Taweret.

Forty-two winters besieged my brow.

Asaph had organized an extremely awkward Thanksgiving vacation to Florida, but, because of the developments, only my brother's family, Asaph and I would be going.

I went to the airport ahead of Asaph, to calm my nerves. 

I hadn't been to this location since 1972.

It was nice to see my nephews.

We stayed nearly the entire time on the grounds of the resort that Asaph had booked. Through one of his many tricks, we were paying almost nothing to stay in relative luxury (not "luxury" in the sense that it was used in New York, to mean a bathroom with a door on it).

My nephews were exhausting, although amusing. There was a water slide in the children's pool. My nephew Zack approached an unknown child and said, "Dude, have you done the water slide? You will freak out!"

Asaph and I both played a game with them whereby we threw them into the pool, alternating nephews. After 100 throws, they got distracted by something and ran off.

Asaph left for the Upper Midwest while I remained with my brother's family for a few days. I overheard the conversation of some drunk middle-aged persons. A male was hitting on the friend of his presumed girlfriend. The sentence "Do you take sexy pills?" was actually uttered. A slurred fight ensued. I tried to read a book about Siberia. I was interested in the Mongol hordes and Genghis Khan and Ivan the Terrible, but it was hard to concentrate.

Back in New York, Asaph and I went to get our marriage license.

We walked back to work.

I went back to the Upper Midwest. My dad drove up from Columbus to meet me. We had a nice and awkward visit. We took a day trip to the capital.

There was a large protest going on in the capitol.

The way the citizens moved about freely, protesting with minimal police presence, was refreshing and inspiring.

I returned to New York after chatting with a well-dressed, non-heterosexual maternal-fetal-care doctor.

I was barely aware of Advent.

I did attend church one time.

Later that week there was more alarming news from the Upper Midwest. We weren't sure what to do. I was worried about some practical matters, so we called the rabbi and asked if we could come down to her office to be civilly married, to cause a qualifying life event. Two witnesses met us at the synagogue, and Jobim came as best man.

The ceremony was watched through the internet from the Upper Midwest.

The rabbi offered some blessings and advice. With a puh-puh-puh she sent us on our way.

The ring we had ordered for me didn't fit.

I had had my ring size measured at a store in the Lima, Peru airport; a store that turned out to be Brazilian, so the size had had to be converted twice. Obviously, something had been lost in translation.

The dramatic events in the Upper Midwest almost immediately stabilized, so we stayed put.

I ordered boxes of happy hippos to distribute at work, since I had Taweret on the brain. Faruq was happy.

I had read that the hippopotamus was the world's most dangerous animal.

We agonized about whether or not to cancel the big wedding ceremony in advance, since we knew we might have to cancel it at the last minute. We decided just to scale it back a bit. The stress of all these things had me reeling.

I recited my new, revised version of the Jesus prayer over and over: ____ _____ ______, ___ __ ___, have mercy __ __, _ ______.

In addition, we needed to move to a new apartment and find someone to take over our old lease.

Asaph called me at work one morning and told me to meet him at a gigantic building a few blocks north. A pleasant English woman showed us an apartment, and we said we would take it. We submitted applications within 20 minutes.

We went to sign the lease a few days later.

"Let me just get my cuppa," she said, making herself some tea. She was straight out of central casting, like most characters in New York.

Because the developers were benefiting from tax breaks, the building was heavily regulated and 20% of the apartments were rented to those with lower incomes. The first page of the lease listed our rent as $9,000 per month.

"Your actual rent is on one of the riders," she said.

The second page stated that all pets were forbidden. This seemed odd as we had had to swim against a tide of babies and dogs to get into the building.

"We are totally pet-friendly," she said. "That's noted on another rider."

We were distracted by events occuring simultaneously in the Upper Midwest.

The day of the move came. I was sad, since we were moving from the nicest street in Hell's Kitchen to a bland area by the Hudson River that was totally devoid of character. It was almost New Jersey.

I thought of all the memories. So much had happened in that place!

I tried to clean it as much as possible, but some traces of our presence remained.

I wasn't looking forward to all the unpacking.

I felt uneasy as I woke up the next morning and looked out the window. 

Our new place seemed very large. I didn't think I deserved a place like that. Even though our rent was not $9,000 per month, it still seemed ridiculously high. There was a discussion on a social networking website about an article in the New York Times that had detailed the plight of two non-heterosexuals and their dogs who had had to slightly downsize their fabulous lives because of a decline in their party-planning business. The article contained this sentence: It was important to be near their office in the flower district, where they are sometimes out buying flowers before dawn.

Our new rent was higher than their new rent. It seemed shameful.

We were told that now that we lived in a building with doormen and other staff, we needed to give them Christmas tips, even though we had just arrived in the middle of December. One friend said we needed to give $100 per person. There were around 40 persons.

We didn't do that. Asaph made cards with our photos that said that we had just moved in and were excited to be part of the building family, and we included a considerably smaller sum. We were thanked profusely the next time we entered.

Where was all this money coming from? I wondered.

The day of the wedding arrived. We had told Asaph's siblings to stay in Israel, although one came with her husband and young son. Asaph's mother and stepfather brought me a replacement ring. Nearly all of my family was there, so our families got to meet each other. I had joked that we were only marrying to form an alliance between our two warring clans.

I couldn't believe it was happening. I was extremely nervous. We had had a very short engagement.

It ended up being a huge production. It went seamlessly, however. It was hard not to be embarrassed.

I couldn't believe it. I really couldn't. I couldn't believe anything.

Comments

[Stan]

Ricardo came to our Christmas Tree decorating after your wedding and gave us the report. Absolutely splendid. We have just returned from our friends Mark and Peter's wedding at Ascension this evening, conducted with seemly WASP restraint, mordant humor and wit, an Australian bishop, and incredible music. It all put me in mind of the old story about the Baptist who moved to New York and, in due course, became an Episcopalian. He went home for a visit with his family, and was approached by a family member who asked, "Now, Brother Bob, you don't mean to tell us that you BELIEVE in infant baptism?" And Brother Bob responded: "Believe in it? Why, Hell, I've SEEN it!"

[David]

Congratulations! I've read your blog for a long time with much delight and sorrow (as appropriate, of course...) This is definitely an occasion that calls for delight, it seems, and I wish the best of everything to both of you!

[Jérôme]

Félicitations et tous les vœux de bonheur possibles!

[Bourgeois Nerd]

Mazel tov! Just beautiful. May you have much joy and little sorrow in the new year.

[Rob]

Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never ends.

[Édouard]

Congratulations to you both!

[Adil]

Congratulations! I am also a longtime reader (from the We Like Sheep days). The best of luck for the Endeavour!

[TED]

Congratulations! You look very happy in the wedding pictures. It's good to see that.

[Brooke ONeill]

Congratulations from a devoted reader of your blog!

[max]

Congratulations dear Eric. I feel happy on your behalf, even though I don't really believe in the institution of marriage myself. But it's got to work for *some^ people, right? And I'm so glad both of you wore ties - the importance of ties cannot be over-emphasised. Such a handsome couple - bravo!

[חתונה]

Hope you had blast time, Israel wants you back here!
Liked the "not pro Israel" ad campaign, also liked them on Facebook.