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Memoir: Wedding

To me, the most entertaining thing about planning a wedding is choosing the readings.

I don't really like poetry. I had to study it in college, and I still don't really like it. But prose selections are clunky; they go on and on and on. One early solution was a children's story by Arnold Lobel.

I've liked Lobel for thirty-ish years, because he was a cranky, repressed gay man who found love late in life, and who channeled that love into "Frog and Toad." These stories are romantic and unsentimental, and they have two vivid characters: neurotic, bumbling Toad, and patient, generous Frog. The stories are like the saga of Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, transplanted to a world of talking amphibians. The only major challenge in using one for your wedding is: doing some editing. But if you cut the first ten pages of any given Lobel story, replace them with a bald announcement of the problem ("Toad is upset because he never gets any mail"), then let the story unspool, you will be fine.

The second reading was harder. If I didn't like to read poetry, what did I like to read? The answer seemed to be light, tart, personal essays by famous women. I sat in the basement of Barnes and Noble--Heaven forbid I pay for any of these books!--and paged through Nora Ephron, Tina Fey, and Mindy Kaling. Great books, terrible for a wedding. Here's what Ephron says: "Never marry someone you would not want to be divorced from." And Fey: "If you're working with someone who is a dick, don't try to negotiate. Just go over, under, around." Mindy Kaling wrote at length about clothing and disastrous photo shoots, which I enjoyed (yet again), but I couldn't see her rant about waist measurements fitting into my nuptials.

So here's the secret I want to impart. If you're looking for poetry selections, read the essays of Anne Lamott. This is a good move for a few reasons: Lamott is emotional but not cloying (and it's likely you'll want that combo, as well), Lamott seems to have a genuine interest in poetry and can therefore make interesting and surprising choices, and Lamott hops all over time and space, from Rumi, to Phillip Lopate, to Galway Kinnell. I found, in one of Lamott's books, a late Raymond Carver mini-poem that worked right away:

And did you get what 
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the Earth.

I liked this because of all the white space on the page. Raymond Carver is always linked with minimalism, which says that less is more. A famous minimalist anecdote is this: What is the most powerful six-word story you can imagine? "For sale: Infant's shoes. Never worn."

I liked the plainness of Carver's language, and I especially liked the sense of a person wrestling with himself, and with the world. The poem reminded me of Carver's famous story "Cathedral," where an asshole narrator has to entertain his wife's blind male friend. There's romantic tension and envy, and the narrator behaves like a clod, and then love mellows him out. The story ends with a canonical scene: The narrator tries to describe cathedrals to the blind man, and he can't find words, so he takes the blind man's hand, and a pencil, and he guides the blind man in the act of drawing a cathedral. The narrator has been so stingy and unfeeling for most of the story, and yet here he is, giving this semi-stranger a gift. A bizarre, sui generis gift.

For a while, I thought about including some portion of an actual Carver story, but nothing seemed to work, taken out of context, and the poem was so honest and succinct, with a beginning, middle, and end.

This whole process took three or four hours--I really, really had to devote some time to those Mindy Kaling essays--and it was a strange and pleasurable afternoon. I left Barnes and Noble feeling as if I had accomplished something, even if it was just having identified six lines of poetry that I didn't hate. At the actual wedding, the person meant to read the Carver lines ran into traffic issues and did not materialize, and this seemed appropriate, in its own way. Carver's work is all about life's randomness, about mistakes that turn out not to be (simply) mistakes.

I was very happy to have included a small portion of this work in the wedding.


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