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Posted 07.23.07 My Big, Fat Hippie Wedding Teepees and tents and pigs on a spit. How we got married our way. By Freda Moon The day Tim proposed, I woke to find the bed beside me empty. We were living in Manhattan, in a tiny apartment with a rowdy mutt, no money and no car. It was a Saturday morning in April. Tim left the dog and a note that he'd be back, but nothing of where he'd gone. The phone rang to the tune of Willie Nelson's "Blue Eyes Cryin'" and it was Tim, telling me to grab Gypsy and meet him downstairs. He pulled up to our building on Lexington Avenue in a rental car. The street, as always, smelled of curry and exhaust, but it was a beautiful day, sunny and humid-the first of spring. As Tim maneuvered us through the city traffic, up the West Side Highway and over the George Washington Bridge, it felt too fast. In New York, we walked everywhere we could, took the train when necessary and almost never rode in taxis. I'd lost my sense for the unnatural speed of the open road. As we whipped along a curvy, rural stretch of the Palisades Parkway-going north toward Upstate-the motion got the best of Gypsy. She vomited, twice-loudly, with great abundance and, worse of all, odorously. The smell, along with the winding road and the late girls' night I'd had the evening before, were too much for me. "Pull over, pull over...anywhere you can," I begged. At the next exit, we pulled into a church's vacant parking lot, just as the sky opened up and a surprisingly cold rain began to fall. I jumped from the car, and threw myself into the act of vomiting onto asphalt. Tim pulled Gypsy out before she further damaged the car's crisp interior. Having discovered the reason for the "no dogs" rental policy, he went about cleaning the partially-digested kibble and tossing out an old sheet he'd put down to keep dog hair at bay. Then he shut the door behind him-and, somehow, immediately knew: Modern to a fault, the car's doors had automatically locked. We stood, with our phones and wallets "safely" stored in the car, a car which we were now locked out of. We looked at each other and laughed. Then, we panicked. We tried forcing the windows down and briefly considered breaking them. But where it would usually be me-with my tightly wound temperament-to get worked up, today it was Tim. He looked stricken-horrified in a way that I've rarely seen him. From where I stood, the day was a surprise trip out of the city. It was a treat, but not more or less than the hand-drawn, hand-written books that Tim sometimes makes me or the mix CDs of songs he knows I'll love-not more or less than his usual generosity. For me, it was a gesture. And it wouldn't be ruined by the vomit, the rain or the hours we were about to wait for AAA to find us. It couldn't have been. But for Tim, it was the image of his grandparents' wedding bands locked in a rental car on the side of the highway, and his elaborately planned proposal being sabotaged by an equally elaborate "ha-ha!" from the universe. He knew the significance of the day because he planned it. Once we were rescued by AAA's tow truck driver and back on the road, we worked our way to Cold Spring, a Victorian village between deep cliffs and beside the cold water of the Hudson-a town not unlike my hometown. The rain had turned to a thick misty fog. Tim put on a tape he'd made, a collection of our songs, and walked around to my side of the car. He handed me a book he'd made, a song book, and he got on his knee. I don't remember the rest, except the look on his face, so nervous and full of anticipation. At the time, Tim and I had been together for more than five years, sharing a home, a dog, checking accounts and-we both knew-a future. We'd long ago realized that our relationship was as strong, loving and respectful as any we'd seen. So taking it from basically married to actually married was not a leap. It was something we'd do, we said, when we could do it our way-when we were done with graduate school, maybe, or when we had the money to take a massive, globe-trotting adventure of a honeymoon. We wanted our wedding to be a celebration of what we already had, not to transform our relationship into something else, as weddings of previous eras had done. My parents were not together long-long enough to make me, but not much more. They were never married, never in love. It wasn't meant to last, and it didn't (and, believe me, we're all grateful for that). My mom married a mortician when she was young, but divorced within a year and never remarried. My dad-despite a more than decade-long relationship-never made it official. Still every bit as opposed to "the system" as he was in his youth, he hates the idea of the legal system being a part of his love life. Yet, in preparing for my wedding, he'd thrown himself into the event with a fervor he'd previously reserved for his life's passions-sailing chief among them. He'd planted grass seed, downed redwood branches, hauled kindling and painted the house inside and out. I called one day to learn that he, at 62, had spent the afternoon with a high-pressure spray gun, cleaning the roof. In the only photo I have of my parents as "a couple," they're standing in the burnt orange sand of Baja California, with cacti all around and a teepee in the distance. My mom is naked with a huge belly, full of me, and the blackest hair I've ever seen. Cleopatra hair. And my father is dark from the desert sun, lean and bare-chested with long Indian braids. They're incredible looking. My dad had packed up his canoe, teepee and my very pregnant mom and taken them to Mexico to figure out what to do next-or maybe just take some pressure off. They were hippies-but not of the burnt-out, drug-addled (though, certainly, they had their share), space-cadet variety now celebrated in pop culture. My parents are both fierce people, passionate and smart and political. They were living lives different from those that most people lived, from those of their parents. Early on, they shared me every few days, but as I grew older it became a week, then two, with me toting a bag of clothes back and forth between two very different households. My mom had a series of apartments, but my dad has lived in the same sprawling, if ramshackle, ranch house for the last 27 years. It was, and somehow still is, my home. That patch of Mendocino soil still feels like a sacred place-a place that I know better than any other, and a place that knows me. And since Tim, who grew up traveling the world as a child of the Foreign Service, doesn't have a hometown in the same unambiguous way, we both wanted to have our wedding in Mendocino, on dad's land. We wanted to do it the Northern California way, with a big hippie wedding in the woods. Though it didn't happen the way Tim had planned, to me his proposal has become an allegory about marriage. It's the story of what marriage means to us, and how it is different from what marriage once meant, and of what it now means to so many. It's not the creation story, because that story happened long before, but it's the story that explains why when we wrote "getting hitched" on our invitations: We savored the irony. It's the story that explains why we didn't care so much about the vows as we did the music (a great Americana jug band, The Kerosene Kondors, led by our friend and "officiate" Will Stenberg, sang Johnny Cash's "Ring of Fire" as our wedding march), why everyone who wanted to come came, why I don't worry that our marriage will mean "settling down" or growing up or selling out. All of those things, I know, are fears that Tim and I share. That's why I love that we couldn't pull off a day trip into the country-and a Kodak proposal-without it becoming an adventure. So, in keeping with this allegory, Tim and I chose "a gathering" for our wedding in place of a to-do. We had friends, family, former teachers, former lovers and an assortment of strangers. Some were sent invitations, others heard through the word-of-mouth chain reaction for which small towns are famous. We designed, printed and assembled our invitations ourselves-an effort to save money, as much as to avoid the hearts, doilies and elaborate script of generic invites. Inside, they read, "We're Gettin' Hitched!" in a 1950s-esque font and told our would-be guests that we hoped our wedding would be casual-a party more than a ceremony. We asked them to come, bring tents, sleeping bags and the warm clothes necessary for a summer in Mendocino County and stay for days. From a vintage shop in Chicago, I bought a 1950s cocktail dress of the highest order: mint green, strapless, elaborately embroidered, with plenty of pouf. To accompany it, I bought gold wedge heels and wore my hair upswept. Tim found a similarly gaudy get-up: a cream-colored sport coat and a sharp pinkish-red bow tie (from a local tag sale), a lime green shirt with pearl buttons, brown linen pants and white-and-red checkered Vans. Our families and extended families-the group of my parent's old friends who call themselves "the tribe"-helped with moral support, manual labor and gifts. One, who runs a party rental shop, provided cotton candy, ice cream and margarita machines. Another, a professional photographer, took photos as a gift to us. My mother, a wild-eyed Italian mama in the kitchen, catered. And in addition to restoring my childhood home to a grandeur it may never have seen, my dad bought a teepee love-nest for Tim and me to stay in. My brother, who inherited the food gene, taught Tim the art of killing and roasting a pig on a spit. The men in the family fished for salmon for dinner and there were bonfires, hay bale benches, an abundance of Christmas lights, street dogs and kids on the loose, the smell of the ocean, spotty cell phone reception, a strong chance of fog and the inevitable wafts of sweet-smelling smoke. And-even after six and a half years together-it was a hastily prepared ceremony. Another adventure. |
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