It is 8:15 or so, Nevada time (Tuesday). I’m dressed, and Jane is “getting ready.” Cameras are at hand, papers for signing at the chapel are about. We need to pick up her corsage at the florist before we head out to the Chapel on the Corner, a nondescript little hut on a nondescript Nevada street near a courthouse. What can you say about the street’s name, “Basic”? (How did I ever end up in Nevada?) Jane, as always, is in good spirits for she is a very optimistic person and given her neanderthalish family it is always remarkable how individuals manage to surmount their adversities without even being aware of the malignancies. Who of us ever realizes the real context of our early lives or our present living? An imaginative old age seens to be an answer in which one reflects back. This morning I am thinking about my 69 years and the circumstances that have made me. No methodology and no analysis can do it justice. I am not bewildered by my life but I am not a little astonished at what I have and what I have not made of it. As I wrote to my son, Jordan, last night, who is about to quit his job and enter a risky journey to reclaim his young life and to precipitate a personal adventure, for he is fed up with the grind and how this culture, any culture, drives you mad, he is entering “the unexplored country” (Hamlet).
It is Wednesday. The marriage went off without a hitch, although jerk forgot to put film in his retro camera (just love that old man anxiety); however, enough shots were taken with Jane’s digital and we videotaped ourselves at the chapel as well as interviewed one another when we got home which is hilarious to watch. It has been a kind of tradition since we toured Spain and Portugal in 2007 to end our day with a mutual interview about the day’s events. It reminds me now since I’m up to my throat in reading Peter Gay’s biography of Freud (really good, masterly, and very lucidly presented) of the “day’s residues” which serve to make up the manifest aspect of dreams. In any case a few comments about the minister and ceremony.
Kathy, the woman minister, made a simple non-denominational service free of most cant and religiosity which is what we asked her to do. Bright, intelligent, a Southern woman, she was going to helicopter to the Grand Canyon after our ceremony. A 45 minute trip, eight hours round trip by car, she has been performing marriages there for several years. We paid for a witness who was from the East coast and so I spoke East coast to him and we got along. We both miss pastrami sandwiches. It was a light hearted ceremony, brief, short, friendly with good cheer among us all. As is my way, I kibitzed with Kathy which is my way of bringing people into my circle so that we interact in a more friendly way and it worked. Kathy who performed the service and Sheila the florist who made Jane’s delightful corsage made the day smoothly flow by like a meandering, lazy and bucolic river.
We spent the late morning at a local casino losing money, my most recent vice, and having dinner out at a local eatery which we favor. We will honeymoon at the new CityCenter on the strip which is a light year away from the other theme-based hotel/casinos — New York, New York, Excalibur and the like. We will be staying at the Aria for a few days, relishing the magnificent shopping and the resplendent art work interlaced throughout this hotel and the entire complex — Henry Moore, Maya Lin, et al. Imagine Fifth Avenue shopping and the Plaza and you have a taste of it all, 8.5. billion worth. Jane and I spend our days writing, computing, her preparing for the next semester and my rewriting a book of short stories to be published this spring. I married a very special woman who has the graceful elan vital of a gazelle and she has married a grumpy, ornery but not a mean-hearted bull elephant. And they lived happily ever after — Jane has mentioned to me that in fairy tales we never have a look in or at or an eyeful or earful of what those days between the prince and princess are like after they wed.
I’ll keep you posted.
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