Chicken Soup for the Bride's Soul (32 page)

They could have prevented many arguments by clearly stating that the first person in bed automatically claims all blanket rights. That doing the laundry includes putting it away. Ten years later, we still argue over the right way to load the dishwasher, butter toast and hang a roll of toilet paper. A little training would have gone a long way.

We weren’t warned about the dangers of decorating together. And people wonder why divorce statistics are so high. If you want to educate people about making marriages work, don’t belabor the miracles of two becoming one. Tell me what I can shove up his nose to stop him from snoring.

Yet, somehow—despite a lack of preparation, training and maintenance—our marriage still chugs along. Sure, it could use a tune up. It’s had its dings and its fender benders. With two more passengers on board, my bumper’s a little bigger (no comments, please).

But it runs. And it hasn’t depreciated since we drove off the church lot those ten years past. In fact, it’s worth even more.

It must be a classic.

Caroline Pignat

“I can’t wait to get out of this sweaty shirt so you can wash it!”

Reprinted by permission of Dan Rosandich.

Someday My Prince Will
—Bring Coffee

L
isten to me, Mister. You’re my knight in shining armor . . . don’t you forget it.

Ethel Thayer to Norman Thayer
in
On Golden Pond

The prince rode up on a white horse, in full costume complete with plumed hat.

He leaped from the horse and strode up to his future bride who waited for him in princess costume complete with tiara. He knelt before her on one knee and presented her with a diamond. The home video wobbled slightly as he asked, “Will you marry me?” Her tearful “yes” misted the eyes of every woman in the room.

For us, it was the high point of this week’s couples meeting at our church. We all smiled dreamily at this intuitive young man who had rented costumes to make the day perfect for his future bride.

Meanwhile, a chorus of groans erupted from the men in the room, my husband among them. They turned to the “prince” and started ribbing him, unanimously agreeing that he was banned from their “guy movie nights.”

The video reminded me how, back in our college days, my husband Don had been quite prince-like on occasion. When we were engaged, he and members of his service club stood under my dorm window and serenaded me on a crisp September evening. As the years passed, he definitely reverted to street clothes. But I don’t mind. One thing I know for sure: the costume doesn’t make the prince.

Don’s faithfulness and devotion in the midst of day-today living keeps him my champion.

He comforted me through ten childless years, three miscarriages and two births, and then stepped in to help when postpartum depression overwhelmed me.

He mourned my father’s death with me and helped me through that first painful Christmas three weeks later.

He held my hand at the news of my cancer, cried with me as we faced our uncertain future and nursed my scarred body after surgery.

He saw my round, bald scalp and lashless eyes after weeks of chemo, and did all he could to cheer me up.

He traded golf for Little League, steak for pizza and Schwarzenegger for Disney. He discreetly wiped away tears of pride when his kids performed and when caught, chuckled with embarrassment.

He spoke up when a waitress miscalculated in his favor. He gave a carton of milk and box of doughnuts to a homeless man in front of the grocery store.

Just last night I was working away at my desk when Don came in with a cup of coffee, black, one sugar, the way I like it. I smiled like a besotted newlywed and clutched his hand.

“Honey,” I said, “you’re wearing your prince costume again.”

Deborah Thomas

A Husband for June Cleaver

T
wenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.

Mark Twain

My mother was the most conservative person I knew. She was my dearest friend, but if there were ever conflicts between mother and daughter it usually had to do with her conservatism versus my free spirit. Once she was flabbergasted when she met me for lunch and I walked through the lobby of the St. Louis Marriott wearing shorts.

“Honey, you should have long pants on inside of a hotel,” she whispered worriedly to me. “Mom, I don’t think anyone will faint over it,” I teased.

She put June Cleaver to shame. When I was small, my mother wore white gloves and a dress to her doctor’s appointments. Even at seventy-four, she was the epitome of class and etiquette. So you can understand my surprise by her phone call that morning.

“You’re going where, Mom?”

“China Garden Buffet,” she answered nonchalantly.

“You mean, a
date?
”

“Well, I think so, sweetie. Bill said he wanted to take me for Chinese and I told him I’d love to, but I insisted that we go Dutch, because since your dad died, I don’t expect people to be taking care of me.”

“Right.”

“Well, he said no,” she explained. “He said he was going to pay insisting that it was a
date
.”

“A date?!” I shouted in shock.

“Well, that’s what he said,” she giggled.

I hadn’t heard this kind of giddiness in my mother in twenty years.

My husband never understood why I worried about my mom after my dad died. “Honey, your mother went down the water slide at Water World. She’s not an old lady, you know.”

I knew that. But I still worried that being without my dad would destroy her unless I intervened. The responsibility of her widowhood weighed on me like a boulder that I couldn’t lift off my shoulders. I was terrified that loneliness would eventually do her in.

“There’s a condo development right near us. We could move her here to Colorado,” I explained. “My grandmother started drinking when her husband died. I just can’t leave her all alone.”

The next morning my mom called to tell me about her date. Suddenly she had to go answer her ringing doorbell. I could hear her talking to someone, thanking them and laughing.

“Oh, sweetie, I just got the most beautiful bouquet of flowers.”

“From who?”

“From Bill. He’s right here.”

“He came over this morning?” I couldn’t believe my ears.

“Yes! He picked them for me on his walk.”

The following week an envelope of photos arrived: pictures of Mom at the Botanical Garden and sitting hand-in-hand with Bill on a riverboat beneath the St. Louis Arch. Then came the last picture.

“Oh my God, she’s sitting on a giant turtle!” I exclaimed.

“A turtle? Let me see,” my husband said, grabbing the photo. “It’s a statue. I guess they went to the children’s zoo. She looks like a little girl.”

“I know,” I said rolling my eyes.

I realized that Bill was the opposite of my father who had been the company president and former ROTC sergeant. Bill had been a chaplain in the war and didn’t think twice about joining his men by jumping out of an airplane behind enemy lines.

“. . . to give them moral support,” he said humbly.

He played the guitar, worked on houses for Habitat for Humanity and volunteered for six other organizations.

“We’re going on a hike,” my mom announced one day on the phone. “Bill needs my help because we’re taking along four mentally retarded adults and we have to make sure they can stay on the trail.”

I was so proud of her but I had to suppress my laughter. Was this really my mother doing all this?

Then she told me something that seemed to make the Earth move.

“Bill asked me to marry him and I said yes,” she gushed. “We thought we’d have a small, private ceremony the day after Christmas so you kids could all be here.”

I flew in a month before the wedding to help with the arrangements and to help mom find a dress.

“May I help you?” the middle-aged saleswoman asked.

“We need a wedding dress,” I smiled.

“And will you be needing a mother-of-the-bride dress also?” she asked my mom.

“No, she
is
the bride,” I said.

“Oh, how simply marvelous!”

My mother became the hit of Lord & Taylor. Every saleswoman over the age of sixty wanted to meet this septuagenarian who had beaten the odds and found true love again.

The day of her wedding, mom was getting dressed. “Look, new underwear!” she said holding up a pink and white striped bag.

“You went to Victoria’s Secret, Mom?” I grabbed the bag laughing and pulled out the items.

“Well, I wanted something nice to get married in.”

“Mom, I cannot believe that you, June Cleaver, actually walked into a Victoria’s Secret.”

“Oh don’t be silly,” she said placing the bag on her dresser. “It’s just a pretty bra.”

The wedding was perfect from the small ceremony in front of her pastor in the church vestibule, to the Mickey and Minnie Mouse atop their tiny wedding cake.

The next morning Momand Bill came to see us with a few hours to kill before their flight. I noticed a bag in her hand.

“What’s that?”

“Bob Evans,” she laughed. “They have that all-you-can-eat breakfast bar and Bill loves their bacon.”

“You went to Bob Evans’ breakfast bar the morning after your wedding night?”

“Sure, why not?”

“They’re very reasonable,” Bill chimed in. “All you can eat for $5.99.”

The next day she called from Disney World to tell me that they got on a shuttle bus full of cheerleaders from North Carolina who gave them a cheer on the bus when they found out she and Bill were newlyweds.

Then she went on to tell me that the wipers on the rental car kept squirting water and they had to drive it that way.

“We couldn’t figure out how to turn it all off and it squirted the people next to us. I got the giggles so badly I almost wet my pants,” she laughed.

“I wish my mother could have found a man,” my friend Jody said as I showed her the picture of my mom and Bill hugging Mickey Mouse at Disney World.

“She could if she wanted to,” I said without hesitation.

I realized that it’s not a lack of good men out there. My mom had the only real ingredient necessary to become a bride. She knew how to do more than love. She also knew how to receive it.

Carla Riehl

Small Beds, Soft Hearts

I
f you live to be a hundred, I want to live to be a hundred minus one day, so I never have to live without you.

Winnie the Pooh

Preparing for a cross-country move, my wife and I had big plans to ditch our queen-sized bed and buy a new king-sized waterbed with dual heaters. Roomy and comfortable, exactly what we needed.

Or so I thought.

As hospital chaplain, I see a lot of people in bed. One day, a nurse directed me to the room of an eighty-nine-year-old man who had just died in her unit.

Filled with pictures and mementos, the room intentionally communicated to staff that this man was not to be identified by number or diagnosis. He had a name, a life and a family that loved him.

The bed swallowed the frame of this slight man enough to allow his widow to perch on a small edge in the top corner of the mattress. She leaned into his stiff, sagging shoulder and held his hand while caressing his arm. His eyes were closed and his mouth open.

As I sat and talked with the family, the widow told me she had shared a bed with this man for fifty-eight years. During all that time, the couple had used only a double— not a queen or king—just a double. Now she was wondering how cold the night would get without him.

“I just can’t understand it,” she said. “So many of our friends buy these big beds. They say they need the space. But the beds are so big, you lose each other.”

Her amazement made her friends’ beds sound like the Grand Canyon, not perhaps a simple, king-size waterbed with dual heaters.