Chicken Soup for the Bride's Soul (30 page)
Read Chicken Soup for the Bride's Soul Online
Authors: Jack Canfield
I felt my stomach flip and my skin go cold as I realized every person in the church would take what I said next as a solemn oath sworn before
them
. But I did mean it—I really did—and so I took a deep breath and said it.
“I do.”
Amidst the partying that followed, I most vividly remember slow dancing with my new father-in-law. He held my hands and with misty eyes welcomed me into the family. Him, the gruff, burly man who used to yell like a dragon when I kept his boy out too late.
I also remember seeing lots and lots of cheering people, faces I associated with Christmas. And I remember thinking none of them felt like strangers anymore. Not even the ones I didn’t recognize at all.
My mother was right—I did marry the whole family.
But, instead of being the burden I’d imagined, they were by far the best wedding gift I got. Many of them I still don’t know very well, and some of them will always be a bit unsavory or unscrupulous, but every single one of them—blood relations or not—is family. And they’ve given me new insight into what that means.
It means more than attending funerals or baby showers.
It means there are hundreds of people out there who are bound to me with a sense of love and duty so strong it doesn’t even require knowing each other’s names.
It means those people are there for me and, by extension, for my family.
I might still leave Michigan someday—for a vacation. But I’ll have a whole lot of postcards to send home when I do.
Marie S. Lyle
Bark and I planned a simple, elegant wedding. Since we’d already broken tradition by purchasing a house and moving in together, we also wanted to pay for our own wedding. Our budget was small, however, so we decided to hold the ceremony and reception at home.
The wedding would take place in mid-May. If our Pacific Northwest climate cooperated, we’d exchange vows in our backyard, amid fallen apple and cherry blossoms. If it rained that day, all sixty-five guests would end up crammed in our small living and dining rooms.
More worrisome than the weather, though, was family. Most of them hadn’t met and we didn’t know whether the elder members of my Caucasian family would mingle with my fiancé’s Asian relatives. As far as I knew, my British-born grandfather had never socialized with anyone from China. Also, Bark’s grandfather was only one of several Chinese relatives who didn’t speak English.
Truthfully, not everyone approved of our marriage. I knew we couldn’t hope to change attitudes at one wedding, yet if we could provide opportunities to break down some barriers, then it would be a start.
A few members of Bark’s family were disappointed we wouldn’t serve the customary twelve-course banquet usually presented at Chinese weddings. Bark assured them, though, that the caterer would have plenty of sumptuous dishes.
On the morning of our big day, I anxiously looked at the clouds. As the day progressed, my plans unfolded beautifully, and by noon the house was spotless. Colorful flower baskets hung in our sunroom, red wine waited to be uncorked and Mozart tapes sat near the stereo. All I had to do was finish dressing before the guests arrived at 1:00.
When two cars stopped in front of our house shortly after noon, I was applying makeup in my underwear. Bark went to see what was going on. A minute later he returned.
“Deb, you’ve got to see this.”
I peeked out the bathroom window and watched two unfamiliar Asian men lift a red wooden platform out of the trunk of their car. Lying on the platform was an enormous . . . roasted . . . PIG? My eyes widened in horror. The head was still on the beast, and they were bringing it up the steps to our front door.
Members of Bark’s family emerged from the second car, carrying boiled chickens and roasted ducks. I didn’t look to see if the heads were still attached. I didn’t want to know.
“Where are we going to put the pig?” I asked Bark. “The kitchen counter isn’t big enough and the table’s covered with wine glasses.”
“I don’t know.”
“We’ve already ordered tons of food.”
“I guess they wanted to make sure pork, duck and pig would be served at the wedding,” Bark replied. “Those foods are believed to bring good luck.”
Funny, I wasn’t feeling lucky.
More cars were arriving, I was still in my underwear and my house was being overtaken by a fat, crispy, brown pig. What was I supposed to do? Hand everyone a bib and tell them to chow down? I hadn’t even rented finger-bowls. I finished dressing quickly.
The pig wound up on our kitchen floor, surrounded by newspapers and pieces of cardboard. At this point, I desperately wanted a soothing cup of tea, but the porker was blocking access to my kettle.
More guests arrived, commenting on the delicious odor permeating the house. It didn’t take them long to discover the uninvited guest on my floor. In fact, the pig rapidly became a conversation piece.
At 2:00, the ceremony began. As we were pronounced man and wife, the sun broke through and the afternoon grew warm, but few people stayed in the blossom-carpeted outdoors. They all went inside . . . to see the pig.
One of Bark’s relatives, a butcher by profession, used his meat cleavers to cut with an expertise that had guests from both sides of the family spellbound. And pig grease splattered my once-spotless floor.
Business associates, friends and more relatives drifted to the kitchen to watch. As the meat was carved into bite-sized pieces and transferred onto aluminum plates, people smiled and began chatting with one another. By the time the butcher finished, the caterers arrived and our dining room was soon overflowing with food and budding friendships.
The new camaraderie gathered momentum all afternoon. Over piles of succulent pork, our accepting families were talking and laughing with one another like—old friends.
I guess that big fat pig brought good luck after all.
Debra Purdy Kong
Budget wedding photos
CLOSE TO HOME ©
John McPherson. Reprinted by permission of UNIVERSAL PRESS SYNDICATE. All rights reserved.
H
e who laughs, lasts.
Mary Pettibone Poole
It was a beautiful wedding. The dresses, the candles, the flowers—especially the flowers. They were wonderful. The candle glow and smell of roses heightened the intensity of the ceremony.
“And do you, Peggy, take this man . . .” the pastor began.
Yes of course I do. He’s sweet and gorgeous and . . .
“I do,” I said.
“And do you, Dickey, take this woman, Peggy . . .”
Yes, of course he does.
“Please kneel. Father, we ask your special blessing on this husband and this wife,” the pastor continued.
Wait, is someone giggling?
“Bless their union . . .”
Who is giggling?
It’s his mother! Why is she laughing? What does she know that I don’t?
“And all of us gathered here promise to offer support . . .”
Now his mother’s laughing out loud. And so is everyone else. Wait! May I ask a question before we continue?
“I now introduce Mr. and Mrs. . . . ,” the pastor concluded, although he seemed a little confused, too.
They’re still laughing.
But the music swelled and this man I was no longer sure of whisked me out of the church.
“Wow!” I said with a catch in my throat. “They all seemed to enjoy the service.” I turned to Dickey, fishing for an explanation.
Dickey had a look of suspicion on his face as he leaned against the wall. He lifted one shoe and then the other.
“My little sister! I’m going to get her!” he groaned, shaking his head. Then he showed me the bottom of his shoes.
Written in big red letters were the words “HELP ME!”
Peggy Purser Freeman
E
ven for two people who are very much in love, learning to live together is full of challenges. How comforting it is to discover that the conflicts we face are not unique to our own relationship!
Marilyn McCoo
singer, actress, TV host,
married thirty-four years
P
eople shop for a bathing suit with more care than they do a husband or wife. The rules are the same. Look for something you’ll feel comfortable wearing. Allow for room to grow.
Erma Bombeck
A marriage merges two lives, two hearts and two minds—that’s the easy part. What people don’t tell you is that marriage also merges two sets of household stuff— and that’s where it gets tricky.
Take Person A, who has been trekking through life, collecting his own set of stuff for many years. Now add him to Person B, who also has her own set of perfectly good stuff. What you end up with is a lot of duplicated, uncoordinated, mismatched stuff . . . and the overwhelming need for a garage sale.
So that’s exactly what my new husband Tom and I decided to do. And for about five minutes, we were as cute and nauseating as we could be about it.
“Ah, our first garage sale together,” we cooed. We’d get up early. We’d buy doughnuts. We’d sit in lawn chairs and collect our money in a shoebox. It would be great. I ran the ad in the newspaper. Tom bought the signs pointing people to our driveway. All that was left to do was collect our stuff, price it and pile it on a card table. Easy enough.
Obviously,
his
things deserved prime billing in the driveway. That hulking artificial plant was ugly enough to scare the cat. We didn’t need stereo speakers bigger than a foreign car. And then, there was the floor lamp with its glass-table tutu.
But, according to him, this was his
good
stuff.
And he showed no appreciation for my
own
good stuff. He wanted to sell my futon two-seater even after I explained it was the first piece of furniture I bought on my own . . . and I’d studied for final exams on this very couch for four years straight . . . and I actually owed my college education to the comfort of this benevolent couch.
He said it was “ugly.” Obviously, one person’s “ugly” is another person’s “character.”
After a few rounds, we finally came up with a mutually acceptable pile of stuff that would be sold come sun-up, but that was only half the battle.
Pricing is where things really got hairy. I hated to tell him that his garage sale assets had a net worth of about 75 cents. So we each priced our own things, went to bed, and waited for daybreak and the first customer.
We didn’t have to wait long. Garage sale vultures didn’t wait for daybreak; they circled their prey in the wee hours of the morning, waiting for the sun and the garage door to rise. Then they sprang from their cars and swooped up the drive.
These were not your average shoppers. They were the Green Berets of garage sales, picking off a bargain from blocks away. What’s worse, they were also the Navy Seals of negotiating. We held strong during the first hour or so. There was no way we could accept $2 for a perfectly good electric can opener. No way. But as the morning wore on and the doughnuts ran out, we started to weaken.
“How much for your husband’s neckties?”
“I’ll take $1 for the entire box of them—if you get them out of here before he gets back from the bathroom,” I said.
Sold.
When my back was turned, Tom sold my bookcase for $5. A large, perfectly good piece of furniture. And he let it go for less than the cost of a meal at Arby’s. It was his revenge for the pair of mammoth stereo speakers I “accidentally” sold for $30 when he really wanted $30
apiece
.
Hmmm. After a few hours, we realized everything we didn’t sell would have to be re-boxed—and brought back into the house. So, in the final hour, we slashed prices and agreed to throw in the card table if someone would just take the stuff away.
At noon, we gathered the sale scraps and hauled it to a charity drop-off. We used some of our proceeds to pay for lunch and then, satisfied, returned home for a long nap. We’d passed a marital milestone: our first garage sale.