A Wedding, The Past.

categories:

Guitar Town, MPLS

In prep for my wedding to M, I went to a wonderful guitar shop to pre-pay for the battery powered PA we'd use for Rick to play/sing and us to be heard vowing. Sadly, said shop didn't take prepayment, so I'll have to show up on the day-of to pay and pick it up. One more thing to worry about. The shop in question was in the neighborhood I lived in with S, near a restaurant with mediocre food but pretty good ice cream. I rode to the triplex we used to live in, someone sitting on the stoop. I wanted to ask if he lived where we did, did he know about the suicide before we lived there. The bleached section of floor never unnerved me at the time, though I think of it now as I do several other adventures in life, only intellectually grasping a listener's growing horror. (A wildly stray golf shot flying through the sunroof and hitting no one in the car; a school bus driver depositing a 9 y. o. Gringo in a neighborhood miles from his actual home in a country he'd only lived in for 2 months; S and I driving over that freeway bridge only minutes—15 at most—before it collapsed into the river.)

Anyway, here I was in that old neighborhood, which held literally zero resonance, 2 days before the 5th anniversary of meeting S. I looked at the tiny upper floor screened in porch we sat in, and had not a moment nor inkling of nostalgia, perhaps the sun was too bright and the temps a tad too high for me to recapture even the sense of the quality of light from that too-infrequently enjoyed perch. The other 2nd floor tenant was a professional mooch, so we tended to stay in or out, but never about.

What I felt was soaring gratitude, almost manic, for being both so over S's scoldings and for the huge personal-growth that leaving her engendered. It's like getting kicked in the head by her shook loose all the adultification that old lifestyles had buried. She was my first serious, long term (only 18 months) relationship after divorcing K, and it was a whirlwind of fun while it lasted. The fun, for it was over before the relationship.

It's amazing how blind I was to S's emerging self, the towering vanity unfurling from the peeling chrysalis of the poet and serious feminist. Now she's the wife of a mildly abusive semi pro musician in suburbia, a million light-years from volunteering in a women's prison teaching creative writing.

All this is coming back only to express here, I've honestly been weeks without recalling her, months since wondering about her and my own light-years since I unknowingly cowered from yet another of her disapprovals that now seem so stunningly out of place. I'm utterly insensitive to class, but I guess maybe she wasn't and perhaps it was my failing (in her opinion) that I didn't suddenly lift her. It may've been a knocking-down strategy, an equalization, to scold me, but I can imagine that if she's doing it still, what she's described as abusive by her husband may simply be his trying to crudely fend off her wearing assaults.

The lesson you should take home here is none of that tone, but the glee I had turning the moto around in front of the Dupontment, a skill I never had when living there, and a beast of such power and a sophistication that I (a true car geek) couldn't even have imagined back in those days. The joy today even overshadowed my brutally slipping clutch, the inconvenient heat. Embrace my standing atop the mountain, with nothing but a gently sloping meadow between here and the summit, enjoying the view back along the difficult trail taken to get here, applauding the accomplishment of my ascent, and looking forward to the little bit left to reach the peak where M awaits with friends, and Rick with his guitar.