Marriage

It was a dawn-light crusty-snow Fairbanks-mid-October Monday morning.  We were, as usual, running just a tiny bit late.  As we hurried up the driveway to the school bus stop, one of my eight-year-olds asked me what time it was. 

“Eight o’clock,” I replied, automatically, after a quick glance at my wrist.  Then I paused.  “Right this minute,” I added, “gay couples in Alaska are lining up to apply for marriage licenses.”

I didn’t have to do much explaining.  My third-graders knew what I was taking about.  However, it was a different story when the same topic came up over dinner, perhaps half a year ago. 

“Wait --gay people aren’t allowed to be married?”  Lizzy furrowed her small eyebrows.

As usual, the kids had been ignoring most of the grownup chit-chat at the other end of the table, because booooring. But this particular conversational thread had drawn their attention.  My then-second-graders -- perched there at the table, forking up tortellini and scattering bits of Parmesan on every available surface -- were visibly confused.   

I stumbled to answer.  “Well… no.  Not everywhere.  Not here in Alaska.”

“But… why not?” Molly wanted to know.

The fact that my kids were entirely unaware of – and indeed couldn’t even fathom – a heterocentric bias in our society was so ridiculously naïve that I didn’t know whether to be charmed or appalled.  Shouldn’t they be more clued-in?  Given that I am, for all practical purposes (and perhaps barring post-apocalyptic dystopian scenarios), straight, I feel unqualified to explain the breadth, depth, and pain of the gay rights movement.  And yet – had I already let my children down, by not explaining?

“Aren’t Fiona’s moms married?” persisted Molly.  [Fiona is not the real name of the twins’ friend]

“Well, yes, but not in a way that’s actually legal…” I took a deep breath.  “It’s kind of a big fight that’s going on right now, all over the country.  It’s been going on for a long time…”

A long time.

When I was seven or eight, I had no idea what “gay” meant – other than as used by my British grandmother, who liked to have a gay old time.  It was 1980.  The word “aides” connoted nothing more to me – or to anyone -- than the adult helpers who blew whistles whenever I tried to do anything dangerously fun on the playground. I had no idea that two men or two women might want to get romantic.  Then again, I thought any variety of grownup-type kissing was kinda gross. 

It was at about that time that my parents started attempting to sell our small house (which I swore I’d love forever), so that we could move into a larger one with a bigger back yard (which I swore I’d hate, no matter what, because little kids are innately rabid conservatives).  One interested individual was a coworker of my dad’s.  He looked to be a bit younger than my parents.  He seemed friendly.  I wanted to follow around on the tour (because a small grubby child who has no desire to sell her home makes a super-awesome real estate agent), but as usual, my parents shooed me away.  They took the guest upstairs.  Soon after, they came back down again, and bid him a polite farewell. 

“He doesn’t want to buy it?” I asked, cheerfully.  Ha!  We don’t need to move!

The moment the door closed, both my parents burst into gales of laughter. “There wouldn’t be room for my armoire!” my dad hooted, imitating his coworker’s soft voice, and drawing the last word out extra-long.  Armoooooire.”  They laughed some more.

Anything this funny, I definitely wanted in on.   But although my parents did define the word “armoire” for me, I couldn’t quite get the joke.  I puzzled and puzzled.  What was so hilarious about this quiet young man and his preference for large, fancy furniture?  And in what way was this furniture-related knee-slapper somehow, mysteriously, taboo?

In my parents’ defense, they were, for straight people raised in the 1950s, pretty darned liberal, kind, and accepting in their views on homosexuality.  My father was clearly on casually amicable terms with his “perpetual bachelor” coworker, and would certainly never have been cruel to him.  Mom and Dad bore no malice, and had no moral or religious objections.  But in the world they’d grown up in, being “that way” was something one joked about in private, perhaps with a mixture of humor, disgust, pity, and perplexity.  Anyone who was “that way”, it was thought, should have the decency not to make it too obvious, lest they discomfit normal folks.  In polite company, one simply Didn’t Talk About It.

Impolite society, however, was a different story.  Somewhere around fifth grade, I picked up the word “gay” on the playground.  It was, unequivocally, a vicious insult.  It was also, I noted, used only against boys.  I was a bit fuzzy in what it meant, but I knew it had something to do with boys being no good at sports, or too good at schoolwork, or too girly, or too fond of one another.  That’s so gay!  He’s so gay!  Some kids used that word a lot. 

I used it exactly once. 

Brian and Justin were best friends.  I mean, they were, like, REALLY best friends. They did absolutely everything together.  I’m pretty sure they even had the same haircuts – or maybe, back in 1982, all the little boys looked as if someone had upturned pudding-bowls on their heads. They were both nice kids, generally, but one day we had the sort of big playground argument that 10-year-olds have.  It had to do with kickball. 

The game was already underway, and Brian and Justin wanted to join.  Sure, I told them.  We can add one of you to each team. (This begs the question, why the hell was I in charge of this kickball game?  I suck at kickball just as much as I suck at all other team sports.  I have no idea how this peculiar episode of kickball leadership occurred, but since it’s not pertinent, I’ll move on.)  Yeah, everyone else agreed.  We don’t usually add in people after we’ve started, but we like you guys, so okay.  Each of you jump onto a team.

But Brian and Justin insisted that they had to be on the same team.  The rest of us pointed out the obvious fact that this was unfair (particularly because both boys were good players).  It wouldn’t work.  The Best Friends were adamant.  We have to be on the same team! 

Pissed off beyond reason, I snapped, “What are you two, gay?”

Brian and Justin both stormed away.  There was nothing so odd about that, really.  But the part that struck me, the part that I still recall in Technicolor, is the fact that they didn’t storm away together.  The Best Friends marched away in opposite directions, as if I’d hammered a rift between them with my spite. 

Instantly, I felt terrible.  Instantly, I realized that calling someone “gay” was not the same as calling someone a jerk, a loser, a meanie, or even a piece-of-shit asshole.  “Gay” was in a different category.  “Gay” was a word that not only had the power to hurt and stigmatize the two boys as individuals, but to hurt and stigmatize their friendship -- a friendship that was everything to them.

I won’t claim that I understood, in that fifth-grade moment, the enormity and tragedy of homophobia.  I was not that complex, empathetic, or intelligent a child.  I doubt, alas, that I am that complex, empathetic, or intelligent an adult.  But perhaps the fact that I recall this moment in such grim and vivid detail suggests that at that moment, I gained my first inkling of the problem.

I apologized to each of those two boys, separately, privately.  They accepted my apologies.  We never spoke of it again.  I have no idea where either of those 42-year-old men is now.  I have no idea if either of them is gay.  Most likely they aren’t.  But I’ll apologize again now, to all the Justins and Brians who are:  I’m sorry, guys. 

By the time I was in high school, the world had changed – and so had I.  I knew what being gay actually meant.  I knew that my (female) Latin teacher was rumored to be sleeping with my (female) gym teacher.  I knew about AIDS.  I also knew that my (male) boss at the public library was rumored to have a (male) lover who was dying of AIDS.

I also knew that, inevitably, some of my classmates were gay.  I remember looking around a classroom and wondering which ones?  Which ones?  During those years, I was already agonized enough over my own dreary heterosexuality; I lusted after boys, but I was neither pretty enough or cool enough to ever get a date.  But I overflowed with pity at the thought of those kids – whichever they might be – who were harboring a terrifying secret that they couldn’t even whisper to anyone.

It was the idea of the fear and the loneliness that got me.  What would it be like not just to have a secret, but to be a secret -- forever?  What would it be like to find love, perhaps, but to have to keep a desperate and choking distance apart, forever -- not sharing a home, a bed, a night, a touch, a glance -- lest anyone suspect? 

It’s easy enough to feel frightened and unloved as a teenager.  It’s easy enough to feel like a misfit.  How much worse would it be as a gay teenager, I wondered?  I unearthed E. M. Forster’s novel Maurice – written in 1913, but published only posthumously in 1971 -- on my parents’ over-stuffed bookshelves, and read it.  Twice.  I wasn’t given to crying, but the story made tears run down my cheeks. "Someone to last your whole life and you his. I suppose such a thing can't really happen..." 

I set off for college in 1990.  The world had changed since 1913, although that change had come too slowly for the Maurices who had lived and died before 1971 – before I was born.  Nineteen-ninety was the first year in which National Coming Out Day (October 11^th ) was observed in all 50 states.  On that day, my brand-new Best Friend Forever and I walked by a huge poster-board, staffed by friendly students with a rainbow collection of Sharpies.  They asked us to sign our names if we would support a gay friend. Steve and I both happily signed. 

Late that night, he told me.

I won’t go into any details as to what that meant, or how it played out.  That’s his story, not mine.  My role was Supportive Straight Friend.  I’m pretty sure I sometimes played it badly.  I’m pretty sure I sometimes Just Didn’t Get It.  But I tried. 

I listened.  I talked.  We hypothesized about potential crushes, and commiserated about failed crushes, exactly as teenaged BFFs are supposed to do.  I agreed – or disagreed – about which guys were hot.  We resolutely spun tales of a future in which Steve and I still got together to play nerdy word games -- but with our handsome, charming, brilliant husbands in tow.

I went to rallies.  I signed petitions.  I wore pink triangles.  I reasoned with my Midwestern roommate (who interned that summer for Dan Quayle – I shit you not), arguing that if she thought the idea of gay sex was “totally gross” it was only because she didn’t feel an urge to participate in it, not because it was really any more or less gross than straight sex, which (just ask an eight-year-old) is also a totally bizarre and icky idea.  “He's mine in a way that shocks you, but why don't you stop being shocked, and attend to your own happiness?" – Maurice.

I stayed up until awful-o’clock-in-the-morning talking Steve through how he was going to deal with telling his extremely loving but very Catholic family. I went home for winter break and earnestly lectured my own patient, liberal parents about homophobia and gay rights.  I was undoubtedly pompous and irritating, but I tried.

Along the way, I was frequently mistaken for a lesbian – by friends, by acquaintances, by men I might have maybe (please please please?) wanted to date, by my own worried parents (who explained, quite correctly, that being gay would make life very difficult), and by a few fabulous women whom I did not, alas, want to date.  I don’t think this mass confusion stemmed from my activism so much as from the fact that I am a ludicrously butch straight woman.  That’s a topic for separate discussion, but it all turned out just fine; men raised in Alaska, it seems, are cool with that.  I got married.  I had kids – kids who ask lots of questions.

But, for all their rabid curiosity, there was at least one question the twins never asked.  Can gay people get married? 

About once a year – usually on the way east to visit my family – we spend a couple of days in Seattle.  This is a very popular activity. Mom, when are we going to see Steve and Manish again?  At Steve’s and Manish’s house, there is a playground right across the street, real bamboo in the back yard, and the same Set card game that we have at home.  Manish cooks up incredible Indian feasts, and he and Jay each unabashedly root for the person who is not their spouse when Steve and I play nerdy word games.  Lizzy has a cherished stuffed animal that closely resembles Steve and Manish’s miniature dachshund.  The toy and the dog are both named Billy.

Last winter, we wandered the streets of Seattle, stopping in far too many coffee shops, lured in by deliciousness.  We stopped at playgrounds.  We stopped to let Billy say hello to dogs fifteen times his size, and ambitiously attempt to mark fire hydrants as his personal property.  We chatted about subjects of interest to second graders and middle-aged people, and everything in between.  Steve mentioned something about his work.  “What do you do?” Molly wanted to know.

“I’m a professor -- just like your mom.  I work at the University of Washington.  Maybe, some day, you might even come to college here.”

I grinned.  “And once in a while, on a weekend, you could get away from your dorm and go fill up on some of Manish’s cooking.”

Both kids considered this, and looked at Steve.  “But why couldn’t we just live with you?” said Molly, with the perfect sincerity of a seven-year-old.

Lizzy nodded. “Yeah.  You have a spare room.”

“Sure!” said Steve.  He and I caught each other’s gaze, laughing in that way that grownups do, sometimes.

How much do my kids understand?  Not much – and yet, maybe just the right amount. 

In the early stages of any civil rights movement, participation requires enormous bravery, and carries appalling risks.  In contrast, the final stage happens quietly, with very little fanfare.  It’s easy to miss it, really.  It begins when a whole generation of pasta-smeared little kids looks up in confusion and says, “Wait -- gay people aren’t allowed to get married?  But… why not?”

It begins when the United States Supreme Court says, in essence, the same thing.

It was 8 a.m. on October 13, 2014.  While my kids and I skipped and ambled our way to the bus stop, another piece of history was being patched and mended. Marriages were happening.  Not “gay marriages”.  My kids, years from now, won’t think in those terms, so I won’t either.  Not gay marriages, just… marriages. 

The twins already had the gist of what was going on, but I couldn’t stop myself from lecturing. “Sometimes,” I explained, “laws are not good laws.  Sometimes they don’t make sense.  Sometimes they need to be changed.  Our government is definitely not perfect.  But one of the good things about it is that when we decide that something is wrong and needs to be fixed, we can all work together to fix it.  So, we’re working on it.  And now, gay couples in Alaska can get married.”

“Finally,” said Molly. 

You Are Here

NASA image

Last weekend I attended a wedding reception sporting a flying saucer on one bicep.   The groom was wearing a fuzzy cheetah-print fedora, so I wasn’t too worried that a red, green, and yellow temporary tattoo might seem over-flippant.  Nonetheless, when a friend joked that my personal UFO was the latest image from NASA’s rover, my laugh was a trace embarrassed.  

Google image search: Curiosity

Ok, I admit it.  For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been scouring the internet for new info from Mars.  My searching feels both juvenile and illicit, as if I’m clicking on Cosmo’s latest advice (“Ten Hot Tricks He’ll Never Tell You”).  Shouldn’t I be reading the real news?   You know, the stuff about wars and stock prices?   With the presidential election looming, bucketloads of impending environmental disasters, and the usual amount of unrest, bickering, and outright awfulness on our very own planet, and it seems irresponsible to obsess about what is happening on a reddish chunk of rock spinning 230 million kilometers from the sun.  Space exploration is, by definition, not a down-to-earth pursuit. It’s also an egregiously first-world hobby.  How much does it cost to blast a passel of laser-induced breakdown spectroscopes and X-ray spectrometers into the vastness?  Does anyone in Kinshasa or Dhaka know, or care?  

Thus, as I mingled in my sleeveless dress, I let everyone assume that my kids selected my embellishment from the 40 super-awesome options in the Toy Quest kit.  But in fact, the six-year-olds didn’t choose the spaceship.  I did.  .

Of course, I don’t really expect Curiosity to find little green men… or large mauve androgynous beings… or gymnasts who spiraled a bit too energetically on the high bar.   The Mars rover is just taking pictures of rocks, I remind myself.  It’s picking up bits of dirt, and maybe sampling some trace elements.  It’s merely a scientific instrument collecting data – and it’s probably not data that is even remotely connected to my own field of scientific endeavor, which requires atmospheres, oceans, and real-life creatures with cells and chlorophyll and DNA.  The Curiosity is a vastly expensive robot wandering around a frigid and almost airless wasteland.  How interesting could that be, really?

And yet… I can’t help myself.  Curiosity keeps getting the better of me.  I am a Mars voyeur.  No, it’s more pervasive than that.  I am a space-case.  I always have been.  And, as the ink on my arm conjured up memories of my 1970’s self, I began to suspect that my preoccupation hasn’t matured much.

When I was five or six – before space shuttles, and before I’d personally seen Star Wars (even if all the other kindergarteners got to see it when it was released) -- I told my mother that I wanted to be an astronaut when I grew up.  She was supportive, but pragmatic.  She informed me that I couldn’t be an astronaut, because I didn’t have adequate eyesight to be a pilot of any kind.  Blind in one eye?  No Mars for you, kid.  

This set me back, but only a little.  I figured that if I couldn’t actually control the rockets, I could at least be a passenger -- in the near future, when trips to the moon became as commonplace as trips to the A&P.  And in the mean time, I could read up on everything out there, just in case someone suddenly needed info on the sulfurous volcanoes of Io. 

I absorbed facts about the solar system – not just the planets’ names, but their relative masses and composition, their moons, their orbits, and their charming idiosyncrasies.  Neptune’s magnetic field is tilted 59 degrees from its orbital axis!  The temperature on Mercury can reach 700 degrees Kelvin!  I was undeterred by the fact that not everyone seemed to find such tidbits riveting.  

At about the same time, I discovered science fiction.  Sarah stared in scorn at R is for Rocket and S is for Space as she checked out hefty volumes set in Civil War America or Victorian England.  I stopped trying to convince her to read my selections, but I didn’t stop bringing them home.  No one had introduced me to just-add-water- tattoos back then, but if they’d been available, I would probably have wanted to cover my whole body with rockets, robots, and amphibious-looking aliens.  I did the next best thing, and stuck glow-in-the-dark stars and planets to my bedroom ceiling.  

 

Voyagers 1 and 2 reached Jupiter when I was six, and Saturn when I was eight.  The known number of moons for each planet leaped dramatically, and Jupiter’s red spot was revealed to be a swirling storm vastly larger than Earth itself.  The fact that all this showed up on the news helped validate it as grown-up and important, even if my big sister rolled her eyes.  And then, in the fall of 1980, Cosmos hit PBS.  For thirteen glorious weeks, Carl Sagan enraptured me with his billions of stars. If the rings of Saturn were cool, then pulsars, nebulae, quasars, and black holes were mind-blowing.  

The real and the unreal sparked a Technicolor hodgepodge in my impressionable young mind.  I caught up on Star Wars and ET, with a little Trek thrown in.  Dad, my occasional astronomical accomplice, whisked me off to catch 2010.  By that far-distant year, I figured I would be pretty old – certainly old enough to travel to Jupiter and fend off robots with personality disorders.  “Open the pod bay doors, Hal…”  

By junior high, I had discovered Asimov, Clarke, Bradbury, LeGuin, and other classics.  I dove into the related and sometimes overlapping fantasy genre, too.  Sentient plasma-beings?  Hobbits?  Bring them on!  Trashy sci-fi pulp and Tolkein knock-offs?  Why not?  Given that the other selections on the Young Adult shelves mostly seemed to be about teenagers who were either fashion-obsessed or drug-addicted, I was more than happy to remain in orbit. Science fiction allowed me to believe in entire galaxies in which acne did not exist and alien intelligences surpassed any I saw evidenced in the bowels of middle school.   I was the only girl in the Dungeons and Dragons club at the library, but the surplus of Y chromosomes didn’t stop me from attending.  There was lots of scope for the imagination.  Also, there were free Doritos.

But even as I imagined myself heroically patrolling the skies of Pern astride a golden telepathic dragon, I was even hungrier for truth.  Even the most rudimentary astrophysics granted me a view of reality that turned math and science into an orchestral crescendo of awe. I was both excited and saddened by the vastness of it all.  Sunlight reaching us from the edges of the cosmos, after millions of years of travel, was awe-inspiring.  But was the universe really beyond the scope of our oh-so-limited human reach and lifespans?  Could we really never travel faster than light?  Did our own clammy mass bind us to this time, this place?  I looked for loopholes, and made a valiant but incoherent attempt at a seventh grade Science Fair report about the Theory of Relativity.  I dreamed galactic dreams as I hit puberty.  The former was a lot more fun than the latter.

When I was in high school, Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time was published.  I was thrilled to receive a copy for Christmas.  Dad grinned.  “I told the guy at Book Review my daughter would like it,” he said.  “He tried to persuade me not to buy it for you.”  Well, how was the clerk to know that I was Sweet Sixteen and nerdy as all get-out?  I read it once quickly, and again, slowly.  

By college, I gained a small number of additional social skills.  I still chose Astronomy as an elective, and enjoyed the occasional literary wizard or troll, but I spent less time completely out of range of Ground Control.  Yes, there was the infamous Star Wars Trilogy in Puppets senior year, but that was more about hanging out with friends, grunting like a Wookie, and wearing the Millenium Falcon on my head than about pondering the space-time continuum.   

In the years that followed, my addiction to outer space became tempered to the level of occasional escapism.  Still, I was never entirely able to kick the habit.  On dark winter nights on the outskirts of Fairbanks, it’s easy to stare up at the Milky Way smeared across the sky until the unfathomable scale of it blurs my brain… or my blood begins to congeal in the -40 temperatures.

Star-gazing and aurora-watching are perfectly acceptable activities, of course.  But really, shouldn’t I have abandoned that little flicker of hope that one day SETI will sift a pattern – a glittering gem of radio waves – from the dissonance?  Shouldn’t I realize by now that space research is just a bunch of dry, dusty physics, not something set to Strauss’s Also sprach Zarathustra?  It’s 2012 now -- two years past the date by which I should have been able to travel to Jupiter.  Time still refuses to warp, I’m still blind in one eye, and Greyhound’s routes still don’t include Luna.  Even if I still take an academic interest in sub-atomic particles and solar spectra, shouldn’t I be beyond the stage of self-decorating with multicolored UFOs?  

A few days after last weekend’s wedding, I saw that the spaceship tattoo was disappearing from my arm.   Well, that’s good, I told myself.  Of course.  I mean, I should have scraped if off immediately.  Shouldn’t I? 

But just as my flying saucer was fading, a friend – a young-enough-to-be-my-kid friend, which is something everyone needs -- shared a quote.  It was a passage from Carl Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot. “Consider again that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us…”  I was instantly swept back to 1980, and the heart-leaping splendor of Cosmos.  

It’s not childish.  And it’s not unimportant.  Thirty-two years ago, I would have chosen the same spaceship tattoo – which is a lot more than can be said for a lot of people with real tattoos.  And if something is that much a part of who I am, then I’m not going to let go of it -- not the stories, not the dreams, not the astonishing scientific truths pulled from a boggling array of possibilities.  

Yes, space travel is expensive, and complicated, and limited to a tiny scope of what is out there.  No, we aren’t going to discover sentient beings on the dry red soil of our neighbor-planet.  True, there are problems enough on our own world, and we need to invest time, money, and human ingenuity in solving them.  But that doesn’t mean we should forget who and what we are, here on our little blue dot.  “Once we overcome our fear of being tiny, we find ourselves on the threshold of a vast and awesome Universe…”

Tonight I’ll take a Brillo pad to what remains of my UFO, even as I scrub the horse off Lizzy and the dolphin off Molly.  Then I’ll pack up the lunch boxes, feed the dogs, check my email.  And after that?  Well, maybe I’ll pull a couple of old paperbacks off the shelves – something by Bradbury or Clarke.  I never did take those to Gulliver’s as trade-ins.  And maybe then I’ll check the news for the latest images from Mars. 

Google image search: Curiosity

Humans made Curiosity.  Curiosity makes us human.

“We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and by the depth of our answers.”

-- Carl Edward Sagan (9 November 1934 – 20 December 1996)

Happily Ever After

Photo credit: Pandora Young

“No pictures!” Lizzy admonished, with all the authority of her 39-pound self.  “We are going to do our dance now.  But no pictures!”  

Then, fueled by more marshmallows that I cared to admit or even contemplate, she leapt onto the picnic table with her sister and their new friend A.J., ready to boogie for the crowd.

My view of reality did a few backflips.  This was my shy kid, my Velcroed-to-Mama kid?    

What is cognitive dissonance?  That would have been a good question for Game Night, I mused – a whole three days ago, back when the monitors were flashing impressively, and my daughter was using me as a security blanket. 

“The two types of io…” read the MC.

Six hands slammed on their buzzers before he could finish the question -- or the question-phrased-as-an-answer -- or the answer-phrased-as-a-question -- or whatever it was supposed to be.  It didn’t really matter, because in this game of pseudo-Jeopardy the rules were loose, the tech guy kept forgetting to hit “reset”, and several of the contestants were holding a beer in one hand.

Even I know that one, I thought. 

Lizzy nestled herself even more comfortably in my lap, and took a large bite of chocolate-covered strawberry.  She seemed content as a koala, but she was here at Jeopardy only because she’d snivelingly flunked out of babysitting, leaving me as the one encumbered adult in a room full of revelers. 

Even as I laughed along with the MC’s inability to pronounce Manish’s name and cheered Stefan’s dead-panning (“Do you want that in English or Elven?”) I felt fretful.  I’d so much wanted this to be just like the days when we played Trivial Pursuit in Cabot House, when Steve reliably knew the capitol of Djibouti or the third-largest river in South America, and I reliably failed to know who won Best Supporting Actress or anything at all about football.  I needed to believe that we were all the same people we were in 1994. 

Awash in bonhomie and jocularity, I was suffering from Reunion Anxiety -- not the kind that makes people get facelifts, hair implants, and Supportive Undergarments, but, the kind that questions whether we’ve all changed – whether I’ve changed -- in ways that can’t be assuaged with poor lighting.  Nostalgia twanged at my heartstrings.  I wanted to leap towards the nearest podium and buzz my way to personal humiliation.  But reality was weighing me down. Literally.

“What are ‘anion’ and ‘cation’?” said the first lucky responder – that is to say, questioner -- with the self-effacing tone of someone who knows that of course everyone else knows their ions, too.

And everyone did -- except the M.C., perhaps.  He wasn’t exactly trying to hide his incredulous amusement at the remarkably high geek-factor of this crowd.  I wondered what kind of events he normally hosted.  Bar Mitzvahs? Corporate bonding experiences?  Probably not parties chock full of 30- and 40-somethings who’d spent their long-ago university years playing esoteric card games, dreaming up high-tech pranks, discussing Life the Universe and Everything, wallowing in idealism, and attending many actual lectures.  We were a nerdy reunion -- even by Harvard and MIT standards. 

Then again, this wasn’t actually a reunion at all.  The two Cambridge Universities would never host a joint reunion – the horror!  No, I was at a wedding. 

Or, I should say, a quarter of a wedding.  Craig (my college buddy) and Mary (his fabulous bride) only got married once (there are laws about this sort of thing), but they divided the ceremony and the celebrations into four parts, and spread everything over four weeks.  The goal was to share the fun with family and friends from all the segments and chapters of their lives, while never having an overwhelming horde of people, and leaving plenty of time for kite-flying, Hoola-Hooping, and jigsaw puzzles.

It was a fantastic idea.  Weddings are always joyful, of course.  But the ebullience is usually at risk of being tarnished by a host of awkward factors: bridesmaids’ dresses with vast pink taffeta bows, bawling mothers-of-the bride, flower girls with temporary amnesia, yawn-tastic sermons touting a religion to which you don’t belong, pants-wetting ring-bearers, embarrassing great-aunts, and drunken toasts from that one guy who is bitterly divorced.  There is also, at the average wedding, no time for any of the guests to go whale-watching with the bride and groom, or to make s’mores with them.

I’d started hunting down airline deals and researching the locale the moment the invitation arrived.  This sounded awesome!  Recommend wedding garb included shoes that could be worn on a beach and whatever dress I could find in my limited wardrobe.  Child-flower-bearing would be gender neutral, universally available, and strictly optional. Readings were selected by the participants.  Not only would there be all kinds of fun with old friends, but Monterey boasted miles of bike paths along incredible coastline studded with posing seals and sea-lions, an astonishing aquarium, a children’s museum, and one of the coolest playgrounds ever.  It would be perfect!

Well… almost perfect. 

At the front of the room, there was another race for the buzzer.  Miraculously, no drinks were spilled in the process. 

I didn’t have a drink.  I had a kid.

I should have anticipated this, I thought.  I did know my child, after all – just as well as I knew her twin sister, who was still happily hanging out with the other knee-high people, enjoying a million craft projects, snacks, and games in the Marlin Room.  I could easily have predicted that Lizzy might have trouble finding her groove at this whirlwind week of fun, fun, fun.  I should have known that I’d have to skip Movie Night – at which she whimpered and cringed at the sight of the Shrieking Eels, and lost it completely at the ROUSs.  But I so much wanted to shout “Inconceivable!” at the screen, just like I did back when I was even younger than Buttercup.

At least we made it through Game Night without having to bail entirely.  The MC mocked the six blank stares he faced when the only category left was “Muscle Cars,” but for the most part the participants were stellar.  Colleen evidenced the same skills that allowed her to rescue my poor performance with Times Sunday crosswords two decades ago.  Because I’ve managed to see her semi-regularly -- despite my inconvenient decision to move to the middle of Alaska 13 years ago -- she already knows all the failings of my offspring and the peculiarities of my lifestyle (“Yes, I live in the woods in a cabin without plumbing, but I swear I have not created my own religion, written a manifesto, or started hoarding trinitrotoluene”). Already, she’d tolerated Molly’s card-sharking with the Sleeping Queens deck; meals with people who tend to ignore their cutlery; and a jog that involved chasing two wobbly kids on rented bikes a size too large for them.  And now, she proved willing to donate her Jeopardy winnings – a plush cheetah and a Muppety chicken – to my six-year-olds.  That bought a lot of juvenile happiness, but I still had things to worry about – such as the next evening, which was the Real Wedding. 

“It will be boring,” Lizzy told me, immediately after informing me that she was not going to be a flower girl.  “Weddings are always boring.”

“Not this wedding,” I told her, hoping I was right.

And… I was. 

As it turned out, Craig really was still Craig, and Mary really was exactly the sort of like-minded person who would appreciate readings from Frog and Toad and The Dot and the Line, and write vows inspired by Dr. Seuss.  At the reception, all of Craig’s college roommates performed a highly melodic tribute.  We sang happy birthday to Ezra who was turning nine that day.  We were also challenged to find the highest-scoring word with the place-tags at our tables – which were composed of Scrabble tiles.

In retrospect, that may have been when Lizzy turned a corner.  Despite my own table’s valiant effort with YELLOWJACKET, the contest was won by the JAZZY table, at which no one was older than the birthday boy.  He and ELIZABETH were instrumental in that victory.

When the dancing started, somebody produced a box of wigs, feather boas, and inflatable saxophones.  The groom looked fine with a grass skirt over his wedding duds, and the bride was smiling and whirling and looking radiant in a gorgeously not-white and not-poofy dress, with a couple of little kids hanging off her arms.  My shy child started to realize that these strangers really weren’t strangers any more.  And she danced.

We still had three days left.  As they flew by, Lizzy gradually relaxed – and so did I.  I was reconnecting with some of my favorite people, some of whom I hadn’t seen in way, way too long.  I was meeting a bunch of new folks, and – no surprise – Mary’s friends were fabulous.  So were their kids.  On Sunday we were wowed by jellyfish, sardines, and some educationally exhibitionist penguins at the aquarium.  On Monday we hit the high seas.

And hit them we did.  Over and over, in a rolling, lurching pattern that, over the course of four hours, turned almost all the faces on our little whale-watching vessel interesting shades of green.  Molly, for once unable to fulfill her duties as social butterfly, at least had the good graces to have good aim into the bucket.  I held her in my arms as she drifted in and out of an uneasy sleep.  Then I looked around for my other small charge, the one who usually never left my elbow. 

There she was at the rail, standing with a practiced-looking wide stance.  She spotted whales. She spotted seabirds, dolphins, walruses and seals. She even spotted a cardboard box that our captain fished out for proper disposal.  Catching my eye, she yelled to me over the sound of the engine.  “Mama, I’m hungry!” 

I staggered into the tiny cabin, where the bagged lunches stood in a forlorn huddle, untouched.  I retrieved a snack.  My kid stood munching and gazing seaward, happy as a miniature pirate.

It was that same evening when Lizzy took center stage on the picnic tables. Fueled by s’mores, the ultimate childhood ambrosia, she had found her groove.

And me?  Well, it was then, as I toasted my own marshmallow to golden perfection alongside Mary (whose years leading camp kids have made her a true artist in this endeavor) that I realized that my groove had been just fine all along.  I didn’t need to project my own uncertainties onto my hapless kids.  I also didn’t need to worry, because my friends hadn’t changed – not in the ways that matter.  And neither had I.  True, we were all having such a great time that we sometimes forgot that Craig and Mary were the King and Queen of this event.  But our hosts had planned it this way.  They didn’t want to be King and Queen, they wanted to be themselves.  They wanted to actually spend time – quality time! – with the people they cared about.  It was – just as I had hoped – perfect.

“And now,” shouted Lizzy, “We will dance!”

Mazel tov.