“Things aren’t just about me, or us,” my future Trophy Wife explained. “They are
for other people as well,” adding “stupid” as a form of gentle emphasis. I got the point but she continued nonetheless.
“My mama and daddy worked hard to raise me and they deserve a
nice, but affordable, wedding, not a Las Vegas production nor a beach party extravaganza
by any means, but a nice wedding they can remember for their only daughter.”
At that point, I chose to stay out of the whole thing. It
was one of the best decisions I ever made.
Vernell would be her Maid of Honor, my brother best man, and
my neighbor in charge of logistics. I knew nothing about church weddings, having
never attended one. I felt like the late Jerry Clower who once remarked that
in the first football game he ever saw, he was a starting lineman.
The last wedding, of any sort, I had observed was on a Saturday
when college friend Leland Bassett called and said he had to get married. That
day. Leland always moved a little faster than the curves allowed, but this caper
took the cake, so to speak. Somehow, a friend of the bride-to-be's mother located a county
employee in Tulsa who agreed to sneak into the courthouse and get a marriage
license (this was Oklahoma, mind you). That minor obstacle overcome,
we, after some exertion, found a county judge in Nowata, Oklahoma who performed
the ceremony around eight o’clock that evening in his bathrobe.
We all assumed that some untoward news had prompted the
urgency, but no. Leland was just the sort of person who, having decided to do
something, went about it without delay and at full speed. A couple of years or
so later, when I was in the Navy, he and his wife had their first child, a beautiful
little girl. This adventure, the one-day wedding, occurred in the 1960s and didn’t strike many as too odd at the time. Not much did in those days.
After a couple of beers one night, I told Brenda that
story as she was busy sewing dresses for the wedding.
She didn’t think it was very funny, and told me so.
 |
| Before I knew it, she had told the whole world, via the old Arkansas Gazette. |
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