I think of my days as a bride. Is the word taken from bridle or vice versa? Asides aside, the first one didn’t make it to the altar––just a week before at eighteen I couldn’t go through with it, then two years later and pregnant, it was time again. I wore red flowers on my dress not to mistake me with virginal white. My in-laws who looked at me with veiled animosity, except for mama whose veil slipped, were up from Chicago; I kept hoping for a rescue from my boyfriend but nobody with a red convertible shouted “Don’t marry him.”
Then there was the last one and I do mean last. Drunken proposal, drunken affirmative response. Whoops he remembered in the morning. I wore a white dress with big black polkadots and a long white coat and I was thin. I would sit on lots of bar stools that day waiting for the blood test to be read so we could toddle off to Illinois. One parking lot, husband-to-be told the man his name was Tom Foolery, and we weren’t questioned any further. Phone call made, blood passed inspection, and we left, losing our best man somewhere along the way.
At the Rockford City Hall, we found a JP who would “take a wedding” and had the clerk as witness, we did our vows. By this time I was very sober and wondering just what I was doing with this man who I’d never talked to sober. But he was handsome and we were a match like two four-card suits in Bridge. The honeymoon began when enough people gathered to drink us to wedded bliss. Back to work on Monday morning a new bride, acceptable to those who weren’t accepting before. The gifts poured in. We’ve had forty-six years married, twenty-two of them together, the rest as half-husband and wife in separate homes. It works though.
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