The Wabbit
Wedding Stories, episode 6
The Wabbit is in the garden, waiting. He looks nervous, standing there in front of the trellis, facing the ranks of white wooden chairs lined up for the ceremony. Around him the welcome reception is in full swing, everybody with a drink, happy chatter rolling across the lawn. Beautiful autumn day, clear sky, mild temperature. People talking in small groups, bursts of laughter leaping over their heads. They’re not why he’s nervous, although this is unique among the dozens (hundreds!) of weddings he’s officiated over the long decades of his career. Typically the drinking doesn’t start until well after the ceremony he’s a part of has concluded (well, at least not obviously, of course he always knew what the kids were likely up to). But these folks are here for the conference, greeting friends and colleagues they haven’t seen in months. The wedding is just an additional bit of the entertainment. He wonders where he left his notes.
Lynn had accepted my proposal six months earlier. St. Patrick’s Day, lunch at Gian-Peppe’s. She’d flown in the night before and I’d feigned the need to go into work for a morning meeting, said I’d be back in time to take her to lunch. All I was really doing was stopping by the restaurant to drop off the ring. Steve met me at the door. We’d worked out that he’d bring the ring arranged on the couple’s appetizer platter, our usual start to a meal there at our favorite restaurant. That first time I’d taken her, back when we thought we were just friends, Steve had suggested the couple’s appetizer and we’d both been quick to proclaim, oh no, we’re not a couple! But we had it anyway, thus sealing our fate, and we had it every time thereafter.1
Mama Profeta came out of the kitchen. Steve had clued her in to the plan. She was concerned. “People propose here, and then the girl doesn’t eat!” she said, in her heavy Sicilian accent. We assured her that wouldn’t be a problem with Lynn. The proposal itself wasn’t a surprise. I’d been telling her for over a year that we ought to be married. She suspected it would come this weekend. Exactly when and how would be the surprise. When she looked at the appetizer platter and saw the ring, regally placed in the center, she was momentarily speechless. Just the effect I wanted. And then she said okay, echoing the okay she’d given me the year before in San Antonio2, and we laughed and ate and when we finally got back out to the Little Black Car, late in the afternoon, there was a bucket of ice and two splits of champagne from Steve.
We were living in separate towns in those days – St. Louis and Birmingham. Over the past year and a half, we’d been able to arrange our travel schedules so that we rarely had to spend as much as three weeks apart before getting another two or three nights together somewhere. There was a good bit of travel involved in both our jobs, conferences and consultancies and speaking engagements, Lynn much more than me. By the early summer of 1995 I was a candidate for the job in Birmingham3, but it was by no means certain I’d get it. I wanted to start planning the wedding anyway. We knew some two-career couples that lived in separate cities. They made it work. Surely we could as well.
But where? When? My Mom was in Wisconsin, Lynn’s folks in Little Rock. They’d have to travel to come to a wedding in any case – there wasn’t any point in our getting married in either of their towns. Lynn did no socializing in Birmingham. In St. Louis there were my bandmates in Liquid Prairie, friends among the Venice Café crowd, but most of the people we were closest to were colleagues, scattered across the country. If we were going to have a critical mass of friends at our wedding we ought to get married at a conference where people would already be gathering. As luck (and the angels) would have it, that year the annual meeting of the Midcontinental Chapter would be in Kansas City Missouri at the end of September. The timing was good, we’d have friends around and the band could drive across the state to play. We’d get the license during one of Lynn’s visits to St. Louis a few weeks ahead of time. We had a plan.
The meeting was a Tuesday Wednesday Thursday affair. We could go to the Courthouse on Friday for the legal thing and then host a party with the band that night at the conference hotel. We’d let people know ahead of time so that anybody who wanted to join us could plan on staying over the extra night.
Conference planning is a big deal. People invest a lot of time and energy (I’ve always hated meeting planning myself and considered it a cruel cosmic joke that I ended up on several national, international, and regional conference planning groups over the years) and I didn’t want to ruffle any feathers, even though my plan wouldn’t interfere with the schedule. I called Bob Pisciotta, who was working in Kansas City and would know the people on the committee, to see if he thought we could get away with it. He said he was sure that no one would mind, but the committee had a meeting scheduled later in the week, so he’d bring it up with them and let me know.
When he called back the next week he said the committee were delighted that we wanted to get married in Kansas City, but they didn’t like the notion of our going to the Courthouse. The house they’d reserved for the Welcome Reception was often used for weddings, so why didn’t we get married then and there? “We’ve already ordered the food!”
The “historic Simpson House” was across the street from the conference hotel. The Official Conference Program (findable online in the MCMLA archives4) describes it as reflecting the “Richardson Romanesque architectural style” with “paneled wood ceilings, beveled and stained glass windows, two fireplaces, crystal chandeliers, hardwood floors, pocket doors,” and “hand carved wooden balusters” on the stairway. “Please join us for the Welcome Reception and an evening of music, drink and hors d'oeuvres. Music will be provided by two ‘Greater Group’ members, Cheryl Pace playing harp and Marian Craig playing flute. The wedding of Scott Plutchak and Lynn Fortney will take place at 6:30pm.”
Lynn had assigned her mother the task of finding a minister. We cared little about that detail of the event (remember that our initial plan was just to go to the local Courthouse); it would give her something to do and keep her from mucking about in the things we did care about. He was a retired Methodist minister, friend of a friend of a friend. I hadn’t realized yet, back then, how deeply tied into the church her parents were, how critical it was that there be a minister blessing the ceremony, even if they felt, themselves, that they could not. The headstrong daughter was going to do what she was going to do and they could only affect it around the edges. (Never mind that headstrong daughter was a forty-five year old VP of a global corporation).
He reminded us of Elmer Fudd with his bit of a stutter and air of slight bafflement, so privately we called him the Wabbit. He’d come to the hotel that morning to go over the vows with us. I’d persuaded myself that the vows wouldn’t be a problem. Whatever he needed to say in order to feel that God was okay with our marriage was fine with me. God and I operated in entirely different realms, so if this made the parents happy I’d be comfortable enough with it.
Until I wasn’t.
Had there been something about the wife obeying the husband, we would’ve certainly excised that but the standard Methodist ceremony doesn’t include it, so no problem. I thought. What I hadn’t expected was how I was going to react to the participation of Jesus in the solemn commitment that we were making. I’d thought that I’d be able to simply ignore the religious aspect. It was well-meaning, but it didn’t mean anything to me. It was just words, and if those words kept the parents and the minister happy, what difference did it make?
But as we sat with the Wabbit in our hotel suite that morning I knew they weren’t “just words”. Words always carry great power, particularly when you’re dealing with the most profound of human relationships.
It wasn’t God I needed to declare my commitment to – it was these people gathered in this pretty garden on this lovely fall afternoon, and all the people that they represented, the people and institutions, past, present, and future, that they were standing in for. To wrap that solemnity in a frame of Christianity that I did not believe in would be deeply disrespectful to the people there who did believe it, disrespectful to the Wabbit who was taking the time to perform the ceremony, and perhaps disrespectful to Lynn and me, that we would be standing there under false pretenses. Wrong on so many levels.
I explained the situation as best, as gently, as apologetically as I could. The Wabbit could not have been more accommodating. He’d brought along a couple of photocopies of the ceremony and we started marking one up, secularizing it. No doubt the Wabbit would pray for us in his own way, but the words we’d say out loud would be as true and honest as we could make them.
Many months earlier, well before the proposal, Lonnie and I were sitting at Fraz’s and I was earnestly explaining why it was so important to me that Lynn and I be legally and publicly married. We had no intention of having kids or mingling our finances and weren’t even sure that we’d be able to live in the same city any time soon. So what’s so important about a wedding?
It was the end of my Dad’s last year. The surgery for his esophagus cancer had not been successful. The surgeon told us as soon as he came out to the waiting room. No point in waffling. “We weren’t able to get it all.” He tells Mom & Dad later on to expect three or four months. They can try more radiation which might help with the pain. But those treatments make him feel as awful as the cancer does so he doesn’t keep them up for long. He has some fabulous days. One beautiful fall weekend I drive up and take him for a ride in a vintage biplane. He watches the frail machine bouncing along the grass runway as we’re waiting our turn and laughs with delight, “I’ve got nothing to lose!” He lasts almost exactly a year.
Throughout it all, Mom’s there. I ask her how she manages to hold it together. “There’s only now and not now. If now is a good day, we don’t worry about not now.” When he can’t speak for himself, he can trust her to speak for him. “That’s what I want,” I tell Lonnie. “Marriage is how you proclaim to the community, ‘This person speaks for me.’” Watching my Mom & Dad make their way through that terrible and wonderful year, it seemed there were few things more important. And there was no one that I trusted more to speak for me than Lynn.
Now there we were, walking through the crowd. Kenny O led our small wedding party across the street with his clarinet, the music announcing to the assembled crowd that the wedding was about to commence. Lonnie as my best man (as indeed he was every day in those days), daughter Marian as the Maid of Honor. We walked through the house, out to the garden, out to where the Wabbit was nervously waiting. He whispered apologies. Turns out that in the intervening hours he’d lost track of our marked-up version of the ceremony! He’s going to have to wing it. We hastily talked through the changes.
He did just fine. Frankly, by that point I was paying too much attention to making sure I got my own lines right, got the rings on the right fingers, let the joy of the moment wash over me to pay too much attention to exactly which words he said. When it was time, I said, “I do”, Lynn said “Okay”5. Did the Wabbit’s God consecrate our union after all? Then I shall humbly give thanks.
Now it’s a beautiful day, and we’re popping the corks from the inexpensive Spanish cava, having our pictures taken, laughing with our friends, my Mother in the thick of it, charmed and delighted, Lynn’s mother on the side, looking on skeptically.6
We went into the office, away from the crowd, to sign the papers. It was the Wabbit’s task to send the signed copies to the clerk of courts to be officially registered – married in the state of Missouri, September 26, 1995. He was scattered enough, still flustered about the mix-up in the ceremony, that for many years after I wondered if he’d actually remembered to send the documents in, or if they’d been mislaid somewhere so that even after all this time, we’d never been legally married at all. It wasn’t until Lynn retired and I needed to come up with proof that she was my spouse in order to get her on my health insurance that I went through the process of querying the Missouri records division and retrieving a “statement of legal marriage” which was enough to satisfy my insurance company.
When Sandy and I got married (June 9/10, 1978), I was so sure that it was forever. When it splintered and exploded so suddenly and dramatically twelve years later, it was easy to see in the wreckage how that surety had kept me from seeing the fault lines and doing anything to correct them. I had cherished the marriage, conceiving of it as a separate thing from each of us individually, but since I imagined that it was indestructible I didn’t pay attention to how we were changing and I didn’t put in the work of tending to it. Lynn and I have often said that we wished people could figure out a way to get straight to the second marriage so they wouldn’t have to go through all the misery and heartache of bungling up the first one and having to confront the facts of everything they’d done wrong.
Do you know that for the first several years of our marriage Lynn gave me an annual performance appraisal? During her tumultuous single years she’d worked up a ten-point scorecard for what she needed from a partner. (I suppose that, like me during my single years, she imagined she’d never actually meet somebody who’d measure up.) I never scored 100%, but I was consistently in the upper 90s and after a few years she decided she didn’t need to do the full evaluation every year anymore. It was all in fun and it was all very serious. It was both of us taking nothing for granted.
That day in Kansas City, despite my being so convinced that “we belonged together”, and as much joy as I was getting from the romantic lushness of it all, I’d had enough experience of my own capacity for emotional destruction to know never to take it for granted. I was pretty sure I had the power to make it work, but I was absolutely sure I had the power to mess it up. Ceaseless vigilance would be required. Failing and forgiveness.
The wedding ceremony declares many things to the community. The mistake I made the first time was thinking that making the declaration “’til death do us part” was sufficient to secure the future. This time I understood it to be a fallible promise, a statement of hope and intention. No guarantees.
I tipped the Wabbit, sipped my sparkling wine, kissed my wife, laughed with my friends. There’d be dinner that night with the parents and the wedding party. Two nights later, the band would play. Eduardo would be smitten.
It got to the point that all I had to do was call the restaurant, ask for Steve (although mid-afternoon it was usually Steve answering the phone anyway), and tell him, “Lynn’s flying in tomorrow, we’ll be over around 8:00.” He’d know to open the bottle of Speri Amarone about 4:00, order the three yellow roses that would be waiting on our little alcove table when we arrived. He’d slide down the incline that led from the kitchen into the dining room, eager to tell us tonight’s specials. They never changed. But he was as excited as if this was his first day as he described the veal chop, thick and succulent, or the saltimbocca, with a thin slice of fontina... He’d pour the wine, bring out the couple’s appetizer, and we’d talk about what was fresh and interesting in the kitchen and make our selections. I don’t think Lynn ever saw a menu.
An encounter documented in Episode 3 of the Wedding Stories, The Armadillo Ate My Breakfast.
Director, Lister Hill Library of the Health Sciences, University of Alabama at Birmingham.
Did I mention we’re librarians?
See footnote 2.
Earlier in the day, my Mom had said something to Lynn’s Mom about how happy we looked, and Lynn’s Mom sourly replied, “Sure, they look happy now...” It never got better between the two of us.