The Honeymoon

We didn’t go on a honeymoon straight off. We’d sunk all our finances into the house so we opted to wait until our saving rebounded a little.

I wanted it to be special. I also wanted the honeymoon I wanted, not just a bake-on-the-beach holiday. They bored me. What I wanted was to break out my backpack again. But I was pretty sure that Bev was never going to be of the backpack and Doc Martens sort. So, I compromised.

I thought, what do you think of when you think romantic destinations? I thought Venice. I thought Paris. I asked Bev what she thought about those destinations. She said they sounded romantic. She did not voice a preference for either. So, I booked both.

I didn’t go through a travel agent at first. I searched travel magazines. I searched maps. I asked Hemingway. Hemingway told me to book a hotel near the Piazza San Marco in Venice, someplace close to Harry’s bar. He also told me that Paris was a Movable Feast, and that most of the ex-pats had hung their hats in the Latin Quarter. If those spots were good enough for Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Joyce, they were good enough for me.

Then I went to a travel agent. This is what I want, I said: I do not want to stay at a major chain hotel, I do not want to stay in a place that could just as well be in Toronto or Spokane. I wanted ambiance. A balcony would be a plus, but not essential. Proximity to the Metro was essential in Paris, though.

We found a wonderful privately-owned little hotel in Venice. Marbled interior, a little terrace alongside, a cistern in the courtyard before the entrance. We found a less than ideal hotel in Paris. It looked better on its website, but truth be told it was fine. More than that, it was good. It served our needs well. The room was comfortable, the Metro was down the block and there was a restaurant/pub/café a block away. We were even able to change rooms when upon checking in we thought the first room too small for the length of time we were staying there. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Once the hotels and flights were booked, all we had to do was wait. We made sure our passports were in order. Bev packed for a week, choosing, sorting, changing her mind, repacking, contemplating. I packed the night before.

We went to the airport. Obviously excited. This was our first big trip together. Prior to this we’d been to Manitoulin. Manitoulin is great. If you’ve never been you should go; but having been there for a few consecutive years, I’d had my fill of driving around, going to the same towns, browsing the same shops, going to the same beaches, eating at the same places. Had my back not been injured we might have gone on some of the nature hikes thereabouts, but chronic pain had put such excursions on the backburner. So, I was due for a change. I wanted a return to backpacks and Doc Martens, even if the backpack was a suitcase on casters and the Docs were dress shoes and sandals.

We packed notebooks too. I’d always meant to take one on my other trips but it somehow always slipped my mind. Why a notebook? Because even though a picture is worth a thousand words, pictures are no substitute for words. That building, that person, becomes a hazy memory in the course of time. Thoughts, recollections and anecdotes give depth to those pictures. They can also jog the memory. And capture your thoughts. Impressions. Mood. Ambiance.

The flight from Timmins to Toronto was as it usually is, full, loud, prone to turbulence. The flight to Rome was better. Larger. Smoother. But it was also a red eye. I’m not complaining; red eyes are great; they get you in country at the dawn of a new day, ensuring your first day of holiday isn’t a loss spent in the air. The only problem with a red eye is jetlag. You need to realize that you will be crossing time zones and that the time for sleep is limited, at best. I’m lying. You will not get enough sleep on a red eye to Europe no matter how much sleep you get.

Bev did not get enough sleep. Once we were in the air, I waited just long enough to finish my meal, which is always served early on such flights, before pulling out my mask and earplugs from my carry-on.

“Time to go to sleep,” I told Bev.

“But I’m not tired,” she said.

I sympathised, but I tried to explain that she had best try to sleep whether she was tired or not (I realized that it was only about 9 pm by EDST, way too early for bed at the best of times, even more so considering the excitement brought on by expectation), telling her my tale of my first red eye and the resulting sleep deprivation that followed, but she said that she’d watch a little bit of the movie until she got a tired and then she would try.

I didn’t think that watching “Kingdom of Heaven” was worth the sleep deprivation sure to follow. I wouldn’t know if it was. I didn’t watch it then. I still haven’t. What I did do was put my mask on and squeeze the earplugs into my ears.

“You really need to try to sleep now,” I said before sliding the mask over my eyes, my voice muffled and watery through the plugs.

“I will in a bit,” she said.

I closed my eyes, set my mask and tried to relax. I was asleep in no time.

When I woke at about 4:30 am Rome time, Bev was a mess. Her hair was awry, her eyes close to closing, red as though irritated by a beach of salt water and sand. She was obviously, painfully, tired, much as I had been after my first red eye to Amsterdam.

“I didn’t sleep at all,” she said.

What could I say? I’m sorry? I was. I said so.

“You need to get some morning sunlight to reset your clock,” I said. I did not say that she would feel like shit for the rest of the day.

There was a little confusion as to what was happening with our bags. Our luggage was not in Rome. We watched as everyone from our flight collected their bags and filtered out the door, leaving us and an empty carousel behind. “Where is our luggage?” I thought. “Was it lost? Were we going to spend a few days waiting for it to catch up with us?” I asked a terminal employee. He looked at out baggage stubs and said, “You collect them in Venice.” That was new to me. When returning to Canada, I always had to collect my luggage and clear customs before continuing on to a domestic flight.

We returned to departures and boarded our flight to Venice.

Final flight. Bags collected. Customs. Cab. River shuttle between buoys marking the dredged route. Venice.

Our honeymoon had begun.

Hitched

I got engaged. Who’d have figured that? We set a date which should have been impossible to meet, but as it was in October, safely outside the traditional wedding season, every wedding planner, decorator, baker, priest, church, organist, and hall was free. Go figure. Business must be especially slow then because they even gave us out-of-season discounts.

I hired my neighbor, Luc Chalifoux (Midnight Express), to be our disk-jockey. We hadn’t negotiated a price at first, but when we did, he dropped what probably should have been about a thousand or so dollar bill to four hundred. Call it my wedding gift to you, he said. I was grateful. He asked us for a list of songs for the evening. He laughed when I provided a more exhaustive list than he was accustomed to. I guess most people give him about three or four songs, just those for the father-daughter dance and the like. I gave him a list of about thirty songs Bev and I liked and said that if he could fit them in that would be great, but if he couldn’t, then the top five or six would be fine, pointing out the father-daughter song and the like. Closer to the date, Luc said that he wouldn’t be able to spin my reception after all. He was busy and surprisingly double-booked. Would it be okay if he sent over one of his employees, instead? I said that would be fine. I reminded him that he still hadn’t sent me an invoice. He mulled it over and shrugged it off, telling me that the music was free, again saying, “It’ll be my wedding gift to you.”

It was a small affair, only thirty people, everyone local except for Neil and Sharon Petersen, who travelled up from Barrie. On my side there were my parents, my sister and her husband, their children, my parents’ long-time neighbours, the Millers and the Durochers, my best friends Neil and Henri and their spouses. On Bev’s were her parents, her brother and his wife, her two aunts, her cousin Ellard and his wife, her friends Barb and Christine and spouses. Like I said, small.

Ever pragmatic, I bought a three-piece suit, eschewing the tux. White silk tie. All in all, it looked tux-ish and formal, exactly the look I was striving for. I was never one for renting when I could buy and I doubted that I’d ever have need of a tux again, so, new suit it was, despite my having more suits than I actually needed. That might negate the earlier pragmatic boast, but there you have it; I’ve always been vain.

The day arrived. It was cold. I expected that; it was late October, after all. Luckily, we weren’t treated to snow or icy rain. The rehearsal was uneventful the night before. I paid attention, but most of what happened that evening was soon forgotten. I was pretty sure that someone, everyone, would herd me through the process when the time came. And they did. There was someone there to make sure I was dressed on time, that I made it to the church on time, that I stood where I was meant to, and walked up the aisle when I was supposed to.

Bev arrived when we were still at the back of the church. She was not dressed how I expected her to be, not in what she had originally showed me, anyway. She hadn’t been satisfied with her original outfit as the months wore on, so she ordered another. It was an actual dress, laced and embellished with costume pearls. She looked lovely. Her hair was up and curled, her make-up just so.

Then someone nudged me to be on my way to the Alter to await my bride.

The rest is a little hazy. I wonder how many people actually really remember their weddings. I think most people don’t, not really. Most people are too busy being worried that things will go wrong, but from my experience, someone always takes charge and makes sure things move along at their expected pace and that things happen when they’re supposed to. My sister was that person. I was largely oblivious, just swept along by the tide.

The organist told me afterwards how calm we looked. We didn’t sweat and fidget and fuss like younger couples do, she said. We didn’t. I sat with one leg crossed over the other, waiting for someone to tell me to stand, then to “repeat after me,” then to come over here to sign the legal documents.

Pictures were taken. Most are studio shots. Outdoors really wasn’t an option: autumn colours were long since a memory, trees were stark and bare, clouds were grey. And yes, it rained. I know this because I have one of us outside in coats, with me holding an umbrella over us. Black and white. It looks vintage. I like that one a lot.

Then it was off to Cedar Meadows for the dinner and the cutting of the cake.

The cake was missing. My sister told me so, also telling me to not freak out, that something was being worked out. I was not freaked out. So what, I thought at the time, it’s just a cake. We had lots of food. We’d purchased the Thanksgiving Buffet from the Resort and it came with two deserts.

A call to the bakery told us that the cake had been delivered that morning, so the staff began to search for it. They found it minutes later. It was in the fridge. Who’d have thought to look in the fridge?

There were few speeches made. We were a small group, but there were a few. There were congratulations within them, well-wishes, and expectations of our long and happy life together.
The cake was brought out. We posed for the usual pictures. We danced, we mingled, we (meaning I, but not excluding Bev) kept our drinking to a minimum. No one, I thought, ought to get drunk on their wedding day, although I’m sure it happens all the time, but I have my doubts that those who do are fast approaching forty. I likely spent too much time mingling with Neil and Henri, but they were my closest friends, so sue me.

Did we crush slices of cake into each other’s face? No. Neither of us liked that new tradition. Yeah, yeah, yeah, we’re not fun. So be it. That might have been fun had we been twenty, but like I’ve said more than once over the course of the last memories, we weren’t twenty anymore. And I’ve always been the serious sort.

Expectations might be different.

We did bow to some expectations and traditions.

The garter was removed and flung into the very small gathering of bachelors.

The bouquet made its way into the very small but otherwise shacked-up group of women who just happened to not be married

As I’ve said, we weren’t twenty anymore.