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Shotgun Wedding

May 19, 2006 Deirdre Straughan 3 Comments

May 28th will be the 17th anniversary of the day Enrico and I had our party wedding. We had been legally married – for health insurance purposes – since that January, and I had moved to New Haven and started living with him around March, in an apartment just for us furnished with hand-me-downs from my great aunt and uncle in Washington, and of course Ikea (I still miss that round black dining table).

Having given up my glamorous Washington-based job as an international desktop publishing trainer, I worked temporary secretarial jobs in and around New Haven. One such was several weeks at Southern New England Telephone, where I got my assigned work done so quickly every morning that I had the rest of the day free to make wedding arrangements.

Not that there was much to arrange. Enrico’s parents had given us a cash nest egg, with the stipulation that we not spend it on a fancy wedding – they had married right after WWII, when money was tight for everyone in Italy, and saw the typical modern Italian wedding as a needless extravagance. We agreed with this philosophy, so there was no ground for conflict. In my experience, expensive weddings contribute nothing to the solidity of the marriage.

Seeking a venue, we learned that East Rock Park, the place where we had had a picnic together with our friend Julia the day we first met, had a carriage house which could be rented for $150 for the day. The catch was that it was already booked for Saturday, May 27th, the date I had announced to everybody as our wedding day. We had to fall back on Sunday the 28th, and let everybody know of the change. (As it turned out, Saturday it rained all day, while Sunday was bright and sunny. And the previous wedding party had even left behind some decorations.)

What about food? I called some wedding caterers listed in the Yellow Pages, and was appalled at their prices for food which would have been boring even if made well. We hit on the idea of Indian food, which involved some driving around to Indian restaurants (there weren’t many) and sampling their wares – not that that was unpleasant! In the end we paid $600 for dinner for 50 people, while we provided the warmers, plastic plates, etc. – and the food was great.

After hearing the nosebleed prices, we also decided against a traditional multi-tiered wedding cake. Just around the corner from our apartment was one of the best bakeries in New Haven. I ordered three different cakes (one chocolate, don’t remember the other two) for a total of under $100, each of them sinfully delicious, and each big enough that most people got a taste of all three.

Flowers, too, were ridiculously overpriced. In the end, the only fresh flowers we had were a wreath for my head and a bouquet for me to carry (and throw). For the tables, Enrico’s parents brought confetti from Sulmona. Confetti – candy-coated almonds – are traditional at Italian weddings and christenings, and are included in the bombonieri (the small gifts that the bride and groom give their guests upon departure). There’s some code about how many confetti have to be in each package, and at most weddings the confetti are white, gold, or silver (for christenings, they’re white, blue, or pink).

Sulmona, a small town in Abruzzo, specializes in confetti wrapped in colored cellophane and twisted together to form flowers – from simple daisy-like forms to complex and realistic irises, roses, etc. They’re beautiful and fun, and in our case doubled as table decorations and bombonieri – everyone got to take one home.

To save the trouble and expense of engraved wedding invitations with reply cards and all that jazz, I printed ours on a laser printer at work, mailed them out, and told people to call me. I mailed them to lots of people whom I knew couldn’t attend (including relatives who hadn’t seen me since babyhood, if ever), as an announcement.

Gift list? We didn’t need china and all that (Enrico had a nice set of plates from Conran’s), and didn’t want to accumulate heavy stuff that we would later have to move to Italy. But we were expecting a baby. So I wrote up a short list of items we really needed, from a CD player to a down baby bunting, and gave that to my friend Sue to manage. Everybody who wanted to buy a gift from the list called her to find out what was still unclaimed. Melinda said it was the funniest bridal list she’d ever seen. But it worked – we got the baby stuff we needed.

I waited til the last possible minute to buy a dress to wear, since I was visibly more pregnant by the day. (So much for my dreams of a princess waist sleeveless bodice over a long, full skirt.) At an import store I found an elastic-waisted skirt with a loose tunic top, in white with white embroidery. If I remember correctly, it cost $200 – about as much as I’d ever spent on a dress, but far less than a traditional wedding dress would have cost!

I was planning on only two bridesmaids, and certainly wouldn’t ask them to buy those silly dresses that bridesmaids (including me) so often get stuck with. I asked Sue and Steph to coordinate on the color and, in the end, even that didn’t matter since Steph could’t come.

Friends and relatives began arriving days before the wedding. Julia’s father loaned an apartment he had standing empty in New Haven, with not much in it except mattresses – a bunch of our younger friends slept there. Dad and his (then-fiancee now wife) Ruth stayed in a motel out of town (where, unfortunately, their room was broken into and all the new tall people clothes they had painstakingly bought were stolen). My mother and brother stayed at our apartment with Enrico and me. Altogether about 40 people came from all over the world – Dad and Ruth came farthest (from Indonesia, where they were then working) and danced hardest.

Friday evening we had a “rehearsal” dinner, although there was nothing to rehearse. We were already legally married by a justice of the peace, so we decided not to have anyone officiate at this wedding – we would simply make our vows to each other, before witnesses. I had found a small book of wedding vows at the Yale theological library and adapted something from that – leaving out God and wifely obedience, but leaving in “cleave only unto you.”

The pre-wedding dinner was a noisy affair of family and friends held at a local seafood restaurant. My parents, long divorced, managed to be civil to each other (to my great relief – they had not met in years). Most of my friends and relatives were meeting Enrico for the first time; Mom decided she liked him.

My only disappointment was the lack of two important people: Stephanie, my college roommate, was supposed to be my “other best woman” (along with Sue), but at the last moment had to do some work for her lawyer uncle. Aunt Rosie was kept in Austin by my querulous old grandfather who couldn’t bear the idea of her leaving, even for a few days, no matter the occasion. I never forgave him for that.

Everyone else enjoyed each other’s company (even my rancorously-divorced parents managed to be civil to each other). I don’t remember what we did Saturday, except watch the rain. Sunday morning some friends and I went over to East Rock Park to decorate the carriage house. I put up a quilt I’d been making with scenes from my life, along with pictures of our lives (together and apart) and the people in them, and a sort of family tree attempting to explain why all this motley crew of people were there – family relationships, Woodstock relationships, college relationships… We also hung the flags of India and Texas, but couldn’t lay hands on an Italian one. And we blew up dozens of balloons.

In the afternoon we raced back to our apartment, where Enrico and I (and my belly) squeezed into the shower together (there wasn’t time for two showers), and while we were in there rehearsed our vows one more time. We got dressed (Enrico wearing a suit, something he did so rarely that his Italian friends didn’t recognize him in the wedding pictures), and hopped into our separate cars to drive people to our wedding – which is to say I drove my own limo, a Dodge Colt hatchback (at least it was white). We nearly got sideswiped by a Volvo on the way.

The park management had set up rows of chairs with an aisle down the middle, on the lawn facing the carriage house. We had to ask a guy doing t’ai chi to move so we could process properly, Sue leading, followed by me on my dad’s arm. Enrico’s best man, Giorgio, was wearing a tux – which led to more confusion in the wedding pictures as people who didn’t know either of them assumed that Giorgio was the groom!

We got through our vows quickly (so Enrico wouldn’t faint); there was also a response part from the audience that I don’t remember now how we handled – maybe Sue led that. Then Julia (who was studying opera) sang a song she had had composed for us, with text from the Song of Solomon. I recall it as a beautiful song, but unfortunately we have neither a recording nor sheet music to remember it by.

In most sets of wedding pictures I’ve seen, there’s a moment when the bride and groom exit the church (or wherever) together, with a shared look of joy and relief. We didn’t have anywhere to recess to except around some azalea bushes, but someone managed to get there before us and snap a picture of that magic moment; that’s the photo above.

No one had to drive anywhere to the reception. Enrico took off his jacket and tie to play frisbee. Other people sat around, talked, and waited for food. We eventually had dinner, cake, speeches, public present-opening (and appreciation, especially for the children’s-book style Italian vocabulary), bouquet and garter tossing, and lots of conversation, followed by rowdy dancing into the wee hours (with music from our own stereo system, carried over for the occasion, DJed by whoever felt like it). My brother later said that he hadn’t realized that weddings could be fun! Well, this one was. An auspicious start to a marriage, I thought then – and still do.

1 tanzania surprise | 2 coca-cola & an ostrich | 3 justice of the peace

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The Nose Knows: Gut-Level Attraction and Repulsion

April 25, 2006 Deirdre Straughan 5 Comments

Kerry Bailey wrote in his blog recently:

…for some reason I can’t quite pin down I hate morbidly obese people. Just something about them fills me with this unexplainable anger. It’s like this weird sort of intolerance or racism that I’m not quite sure how to squelch. …

It’s somewhat ironic that I, as a gay man, have – in those instances – so little tolerance. Anyone got any ideas as to how to defeat those “ARRRRRRRGHGHGHG urges” ?

…which inspired me to write down something I’ve been thinking about for a long time.

It seems (to researchers, not just to me) that our brains subconsciously recognize people who are fit for us to mate with – or not – and we feel attraction accordingly. One instrument of this subconscious evaluation of fitness is the nose. I began wondering about this many years ago, thanks to experiences with my own sense of smell.

In high school I started “going with” Kris, who seemed well suited to me in geekiness, interests, etc. But an incompatibility soon became evident: he smelled wrong. Really bad, in fact. Not as in “didn’t take a shower,” but there was something about his personal smell that was absolutely repellent to me. I told him about it, and he tried new deodorants, colognes, etc., but nothing helped. I finally broke up with him essentially because of this. I felt mean and shallow about it: I liked him otherwise, but just couldn’t bear the smell of him. It seemed so irrational, and he was deeply hurt.

Years later, I met Enrico. We had a picnic together with the friend who introduced us, ended up at a party together the same evening, went to a concert on the green, then to a disco, then to his place and to bed. It was a hot summer night and, as I lay there with my nose literally in his sweaty armpit, I thought: “This guy smells good!” We’ve been together for 20 years now, 17 of them married, and have a gorgeous, healthy daughter. Obviously, he was a good match for me, and my nose knew it instantly. He still smells good to me today.

Some years later I read an article in the Economist on studies showing that humans unconsciously recognize via smell people with whom they are well suited to reproduce (suited in terms of immune factors – the more different these factors are between the parents, the healthier the offspring). In the words of Cole Porter: “It’s a chemical reaction, that’s all.”

An older woman friend to whom I told this story was relieved to hear it. She was dating a man whom her family thought ideal for her (interesting, well-off, etc.). There was no rational reason for her not to like this guy, and in fact she did like him – but not the smell of him, for which she felt the same kind of visceral repulsion I had felt with Kris. She was past reproductive age, but, nonetheless, her nose insisted that something was wrong, and she couldn’t get past this “irrational” reaction.

I stayed in touch with Kris because he was my Woodstock classmate, and saw him a few times after we graduated in 1981. I even hired him for an internship with the (tiny) company I was working for in 1987. But over the years he got weird and weirder, and I was increasingly uncomfortable around him. He died in California in 1999, having lost control of his vehicle on a highway at 2 am and crashed into a bridge support. An autopsy showed that he had had a long-standing brain condition that probably caused a seizure that night. I never got all the details, but another classmate who had stayed close to Kris (and who informed me about his death) was told by the doctors that a symptom of this condition would have been shaky hands – which friends had noted back in high school: we used to tease him about drinking too much coffee. This friend also told me that Kris’ co-workers had once complained to him about Kris’ smell and asked him to tell Kris to shower more often!

So it wasn’t just me, and it wasn’t just “he’s a weirdo” – there was something physically wrong with Kris which eventually killed him, and many people’s noses told us to stay the hell away, even when we liked him as a person and mating wasn’t an issue.

The conclusion I draw from all this is that perhaps we find certain people repellent (odoriferously or visually) because they are unfit for us to mate with, and our brains subconsciously know it and try to surface this knowledge: “No! Stay away!” This reaction is “irrational”: we don’t really expect to reproduce (or even come close) with everybody we meet. But these instincts are very old and ingrained, for good reason. Human beings (like other animals) have been selected by evolution to find attractive those potential mates who are reproductively fit; the traits that make people beautiful to us are (sometimes misleading!) signs of reproductive health.

I suspect that the converse might also be true: that we find certain traits (such as obesity) repellent because we have evolved to perceive those traits as symptoms of underlying problems (genetic or disease) that make a person less fit to reproduce.

This doesn’t mean that I believe obese people are genetically “wrong” or diseased, nor that I condone treating people badly based on their weight or anything else. But perhaps it explains why sometimes, in spite of our best ideals and intentions, we react negatively to some people, and can’t even explain why we do.

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Rosie’s Funeral

April 11, 2006 Deirdre Straughan 3 Comments

^ My father’s eulogy for his sister Rosie, read by me.

The Giving Tree

~15 minutes, 23 mb

Casey (Rosie’s daughter), Sarah (granddaughter) and Dot (cousin) talk about Rosie.

above: What I said at Rosie’s funeral.

Processional

Recessional – Per New Orleans tradition: “When the Saints Go Marching In.”

New Orleans Jazz Band of Austin

cornet – Larmon Maddox

clarinet – Jim Ivy

helicon (tuba) – Mark Rubin

banjo – Tom Griffith

To hire this band (and I highly recommend them!), email Tom Griffith or call him at 512-458-9544

barbecue and music at the Old Coupland Inn

Apr 12, 2006

Funerals are traditionally held three days after the death. As my cousin Casey pointed out, there’s old wisdom in this: at three days, you’re still in shock. By six days (when Rosie’s funeral was held, to give people a chance to arrive from various parts of the world), real pain is beginning to set in. But we all got through the funeral fairly cheerfully, in part because we wanted to make a show worthy of Rosie (and we did).

Ross by Ross – Austin, April 2006

Rosie was in so much physical misery for so many years that I could not, for her own sake, wish her back to life. But it sure hurts that she’s gone. I thought this pain would at least diminish after the funeral. So far, it hasn’t. Thanks to everyone who has offered condolences and advice – it does help.

I’m trying to keep busy, when not simply too tired – crossing the Atlantic twice in six days was inherently tiring, aside from the emotional overload associated with the trip.

We got home Tuesday morning and I worked normal office hours Wednesday through Friday. Saturday I worked in the garden, clearing weeds and planting seeds. The broccoli that Domenico planted for us last fall are sprouting now and very yummy, and some of last year’s lettuce that went to seed has already come back. Beautiful pink tulips are blooming, from a bag of mixed bulbs I bought in Amsterdam last September. The daffodils have come back in force.

I concentrate on renewal and growth – that seems to help. Saturday we bought an apricot tree to plant in one corner of our vegetable garden. I don’t expect it to bear for a few years; perhaps by the time it does I won’t miss Rosie so painfully. In the meantime, I have whole hours at a time when I feel normal, even happy. Then the rollercoaster plunges again and I feel like crying.

June 30, 2006

I still miss Rosie, and probably always will. But I do feel satisfied with the funeral – as Mark Rubin pointed out, the send-off we gave Rosie clearly demonstrated, even to complete strangers, that she was a hell of a lady.

I haven’t been to many funerals, but what little experience I have of them is that they’re often more about what other people think is “right” rather than a celebration of the dead person. But I know there are counter-examples out there. Have you been to a funeral that you felt was particularly appropriate to the memory of the person? Let me know.

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Paint It Black

April 5, 2006 Deirdre Straughan Leave a comment

The weekend didn’t turn out as planned. Shortly after I sent my brief newsletter last Friday, my dad called to say that he and Ruth both had a bad flu and I shouldn’t come for the planned visit to them in England, lest I catch it.

Not a dead loss – the weather at home was finally warming up, and I was itching to get to work on my garden, which I did so much on Saturday that my back and knees were aching Saturday night.

Sunday more of the same. I was just coming back into the taverna (our ground/basement floor family room) from the garden when the phone rang. It was my dad, to tell me that my aunt Rosie had died.

It wasn’t unexpected – in fact, when he called Friday, his dolorous tone had me convinced for a moment that he was about to tell me that. Rosie had been in the hospital for about a week this time, with a high fever and at least three different infections. But death, even when expected, comes as a shock. I probably sounded strange and cold to my dad. I hung up the phone, walked towards the door, then crouched on the floor. The most extraordinary sounds started coming out of me. Howls, I guess. I didn’t know I could make noises like that. Even while I was making them, some detached part of my brain was thinking: “Well, at least I still know how to grieve. I guess that’s good.”

I’m still in shock. Sometime later I will explain just why and how Rosie was so important in my life. But I had to deal with practicalities like plane tickets. Which was so frustrating that at some point I said to Enrico: “All this is apparently designed to piss me off and distract me from the pain I’m in.” (I had drafted an article about KLM’s wonderful attention to their customers; as of today, that is due for some radical revision.)

Ross and I will arrive in Austin late Wednesday, the funeral will be held in Taylor on Saturday, and we leave again early Monday morning. Rosie’s daughter Casey and I are looking for a jazz band to play “When the Saints Go Marching In” (Rosie’s request). Casey says the funeral will not be held in the church, “because we wouldn’t be able to have any fun.” And fun, to celebrate a life such as Rosie’s, is absolutely necessary. She was an extraordinary woman, and I owe to her a lot of who I am.