Eek, I did it again

The audience of four or five that reads my blog when prompted to, because it knows that I won't shut up and leave it alone until it does, is familiar with a posting I put up last February, It Ain't Over 'til The Fat Guy Dies. http://kelleyo.blogspot.com/2006/02/it-aint-over-til-fat-guy-dies.html

In that posting, I discussed the odd phenomenon that every now and then I'll be thinking about a certain person, usually a celebrity, and within a day or two I see that person's obituary in the news.

Just call me the Accidental Reaper. Or The Reaper Unaware.

And it just happened again.

Check out the photo, above right. That is correct, movie buffs. June Allyson, the "Perfect Wife" of all those World War II-era movies, died Saturday at her home in Ojai, CA. She was 88.

I don't know what precise time she died on Saturday, but I shouldn't be at all surprised to learn that it was sometime between 1:15 and 2:15 p.m., Pacific Daylight Time.

That's because I was uttering her name, out loud, at that very moment.

Okay, scoffers, scoff away. Just remember that I've experienced this spooky confluence of events, e.g., I think of 'em and then they die, more than once.

Mystics, heads up. We could be talking about a chicken-and-egg thing here: perhaps it's not that my thinking of them bumps them off, but that I have a psychic strain in me that I don't know about and somehow, when one of these celebs checks out for the Great Studio Commissary In The Sky, their departing shade twangs a chord in the universe that somehow one of my neurons is tuned into. I don't know. Could be the same reason I think of the Andy Griffith Show episode about the goat that ate the dynamite, and then find that that very episode is being played on TV Land that very same day. That's also happened plenty of times.

And yes, it could be just a case of heuristic rock-skipping--one thought leads to another thought, which leads to a name, and every once in a seventh-son-of-the-seventh-son blue moon, they all come together in one great crash of coincidence. No causation, just two flies hovering in St. Paul's Cathedral that manage to bump into each other. Don't know. Probably never will. But here's what happened.

On Saturday, July 8, I was driving to Post Falls, Idaho from Spokane, Washington on a routine "liquor run." Liquor is cheaper in Idaho than in Washington, so I buy my liquor there. Why not? Post Falls is only 25 minutes from Spokane; I can drive over there, buy a jug and drive back in one hour.

While cruising along Interstate 90 toward the Washington-Idaho border, I had the radio on in the car. I was listening to Spokane's jazz station, KEWU, broadcasting from Eastern Washington University. On Saturday afternoons KEWU regularly broadcasts a program of pop tunes from the 1930s and '40s. Hearing this World War II music made me think of a radio documentary about those years in America, The Home Front, which was broadcast in the early 1970s. My Aunt, Jessie Billon, who died a few years ago, once gave me a set of cassette tapes on which she had copied this entire documentary. She wanted to share it with me. My Aunt Jessie, you see, and her husband, my Uncle Pete Billon, also dead now, were what you might call "World War II kids." They were married, when both were still quite young, in 1944.

Uncle Pete was a civilian pilot in the war. He would have served in the military, but was classified 4F due to back problems. Instead, an already accomplished, passionate flyer, he signed on with the China National Air Corp and flew cargo planes betweeen India and China. That was before my time, but I saw the photographs. When I got to know him, (I was born long after the war) he was with United Airlines: for 26 years he flew back and forth between Los Angeles and Honolulu. Uncle Pete loved to fly. It was his life. (You wouldn't think I was his nephew, by the way -- I hate to get anywhere near an airplane. I fly when I have to, but I hate it. I'd rather travel by train any time.)

Aunt Jessie and Uncle Pete, for understandable reasons, had a nostalgic weakness for that period, which some others who lived through it, my parents for example, did not. For Jessie and Pete, the WWII years were the years of youth, beauty, love, romance, marriage. Never mind Hitler: they were young and healthy and my Aunt Jessie was beautiful. I know because I saw a picture. In fact I saw it often. In fact that picture is burned into my brain.

My grandmother had pictures of all her children around the house of course, and when we would visit her, we kids would see those pictures. Atop the piano were a photo of my mother, (also quite beautiful) and one of Aunt Jessie and Uncle Pete, taken either on their wedding day or right after. There he is in his dapper uniform; there she is, in a WWII-era print dress, with a WWII-era hairdo. Both are beaming. Aunt Jessie remembered that the judge who married them had taken one look at their ages on the marriage license and harrumphed, "Hmmph. Just a couple of kids!" A genuine harrumph.

The music made me think of the documentary, the documentary made me think of my late aunt and uncle, and the combination of the two made me think of that picture.

Now here comes the "combination of the three" moment: I tried to think of an appropriate descriptive phrase to place that old photo in perspective. "It looks like something from a June Allyson movie," I thought. Then I thought it again. Now, confession time: I KNOW that most people talk to themselves in their cars, but I'm going to admit, openly, that I actually do it. I said it OUT LOUD, with no one there to hear but myself, the radio and the dashboard: "That picture looked like something out of a June Allyson movie." Well, yeah, I always thought my Aunt Jessie looked a tiny bit like June Allyson, but the point is, I thought the thought, and said it out loud. Because it wasn't just a question of my aunt's slight resemblance to June Allyson. It was the whole ball of WWII-era wax: the music, the photo, the memory of that set of documentary tapes. I also remembered that my aunt and uncle, again completely unlike my parents, were inordinately fond of the music of that era: Glenn Miller, Artie Shaw, Harry James, Sinatra, Peggy Lee and all the rest of it. June Allyson was inextricably a part of all that, and the kind of actress more likely to be in an imaginary wedding photo with a dashing young flyer than the Rita Hayworths, Betty Grables and Hedy Lamarrs of that era. Those gals all ended up on the inside doors of GI lockers. June Allyson, as her obituary noted, was the one the boys dreamed of bringing home to meet their parents.

That was Saturday. On Monday I saw June Allyson's obituary on Yahoo.com.

Like I said, scoff away. But I'll tell you what: perhaps, as a public service, I should set up a new blog on which I will post the names of celebrities I've been thinking about today. If you're a celebrity, not dead yet, and your name happens to pop up on that list, you might want to make a quick check and see if your affairs are in order.

That is, if you're not already dead.

I have measured out my life with Wally & the Beav

Surfing the web site of TV Land, the cable channel that spotlights classic reruns, (it took over this function a few years ago from its "parent" channel, Nick at Nite) I came across a commemorative blurb about one of the channel's omnipresent offerings, Leave It To Beaver.

Dave Barry once remarked that it was a sign of how truly innocent America once was that television producers in 1957 would think of creating a show whose main character bore the name "Beaver." Yuk-yuk-yuk.

I've been watching Leave It To Beaver almost all my life, something I'm sure the show's original creators never imagined. Yes, syndicated reruns have been with us since Lucy and Desi first created them, but the idea that a show would go on in syndicated reruns forever is a notion that, I'm sure, occurred to few in the 1950s. I'd be very much surprised, in fact, to learn that even Marshall MacLuhan, the guru of media in the 1960s, ever thought of such a thing.

Leave It To Beaver is, in fact, just one of a list of TV shows that I've been watching since I was a kid, and occasionally still watch if there's nothing else on or if I'm waiting for a ball game to start.

My late sister and I were what you might call rerun aficionados ("junkies" if you're less charitable.) We were so in-tune with the reruns we both loved that we used to stand around and whip lines on each other, each challenging the other to recognize the line and, if possible, come back with the appropriate response. The Andy Griffith Show, The Dick Van Dyke Show and I Love Lucy formed the core of our repertoire. (Lynn was such an I Love Lucy fan that she could spot production flaws in some of the shows that she had seen more than 500 times, and would point them out to you.)

There are, let me hasten to add, some reruns I won't watch. As in, "They stunk then and they stink now." I never cared for The Brady Bunch, wouldn't even watch it when I was in junior high school and it first came on the air. Three's Company is another bit of '70s fluff with which I would not bother, then or now. In this same vein, a few years ago one of the cable channels was offering up a real moldy oldie from the early '60s, The Real McCoys. Now, I did watch The Real McCoys when I was say, in the fourth grade and it ran on weekday mornings between Lucy and Pete and Gladys, the December Bride spin-off that put Harry Morgan, who would later play Colonel Potter on M*A*S*H, on the sitcom map. (My mother once remarked that "that damned Real McCoys nearly drove me nuts" on days when, due to illness or holidays, my sisters and I were home from school and planted in front of the tube on a weekday morning.) But when The Real McCoys turned up on cable circa 1999, the 44 year-old version of myself quickly shut it off. Great comedy stays fresh; "sappy" doesn't.

So what is it about Leave It To Beaver? Great comedy it isn't, not like Lucy or Dick Van Dyke. I don't know, but I've tended to come back to it -- sometimes just affectionately surfing by -- over and over through the years. A sheepish confession: a few days after the Sept. 11 attacks in 2001, when President Bush made his famous prime-time speech announcing the war on terror, a colleague at the office asked me the next day, "Did you hear Bush's speech last night?" "I missed it," I replied. "In fact I forgot it was going to be on. I was watching Leave It To Beaver." Hey, it was nine p.m., I was sitting in my favorite chair, and TV Land happened to be my favorite channel. Ipsi Dixit.

Maybe it's just something like comfort food. You know what's going to happen next, there are no surprises, and nobody's facing any consequences for their actions more serious than a stern talking-to from Dad. It isn't great comedy, but because the show's writers based many of the scripts on the stupid things their own kids actually did, it still has a ring of authenticity. Kids don't talk like Wally and the Beav any more, but they still commit similarly goofy acts. The episode in which Beaver loses the money he was given for a haircut, and rather than confess the loss to his parents, lets Wally give him a truly horrible coif, could as easily have been made in 2006 as in 1958. Some things never change, and the tendency of kids to prefer deception over honesty from a fear of parental punishment is one of them.

But one thing has changed, over the years, in my relationship with Leave It To Beaver. As I'm sure is the case with many of my contemporaries, my attitude toward the show has changed in perfect pace with my own growth from childhood to early adulthood to middle age.

Beaver had already left prime-time when I became a regular watcher. I was two years old when it premiered. It ran until 1963, but my mother was such a stickler for having her kids go to bed early that I was seldom up when the show came on in prime time. I recall getting up one night for a drink of water or some such thing and seeing my parents, on the living room sofa, actually watching the prime-time incarnation of Leave It To Beaver. I became a regular watcher myself a year or two later, when the show had left prime time and gone immediately into syndication. One of the local stations in San Diego began running it in the afternoons between 4:00 and 5:00. I would come home and watch it after school. Its appeal to me at that age was obvious: kids love to watch shows whose main characters are kids.

By the time I got to high school, Leave It To Beaver had gone the way that Captain Kangaroo went when I started the fifth grade -- I was now, officially, too hip and sophisticated for such things. High school kids think they know everything, and they love to think of themselves as pillars of sophistication, way ahead of, say, their parents for instance. I, and my sister by the way, took on a derisive attitude toward the show, and no longer watched it unless it was to sit and mock the corny way its characters talked. "Gee, Beaver," we'd say to each other, our voices dripping with sarcasm. In fact we started referring to the show itself as Gee, Beaver. My best friend Jim and I would get together and literally wince at the dialogue, especially in the later shows when the "Beaver" character was getting to be of high school age himself. The teenager of the early 1960s, to the teenager of the early 1970s, was a laughable dinosaur. We were the only authentic teenagers. Whoever didn't speak our patois was just painfully "out of it," as we used to say in those days, and that included the characters on Beaver. The show became a joke.

The next phase of the show's place in my generation's progress from mumps to Alzheimer's might be called The Nick at Nite years. Not for nothing was Nick the success it was, from the mid-1980s on. From about the time the first wave of Boomers hit their early thirties, nostalgia became a highly marketable commodity. A preliminary flicker of this trend hit around 1982, when "Classic Rock" radio stations coast-to-coast began playing 1960s music, and then the movie The Big Chill came along, a nostalgia trip for the "war babies" generation that preceded ours. Dredging up the TV shows that we had all grown up with couldn't be far behind, and when I returned to the U.S. in 1988 after two years in Europe, I was delighted to find the Nickelodeon channel offering, after 8 p.m., a cornucopia of nostalgic treats for those who were kindergarten-aged during the Kennedy years: Make Room For Daddy, My Three Sons, Mr. Ed and The Donna Reed Show, one right after the other, irresistible as pistachios.

From having been the butt of jokes 20 years earlier, Leave It To Beaver was now a "classic." It had become one of those shows that you, with your nascent middle-aged spread, could tune in after a couple of Scotch-and-sodas and get all misty for home, sweet yesterday, that pre-work-force arcadia when your most daunting responsibility was getting your math homework done, and your biggest anxiety whether your younger brother was going to get more Christmas presents than you did.

And now? Now that the 1960s are too far behind us to even occasion nostalgia, Beaver has become a cultural artifact, a distant mirror into which we can gaze with a telescope and make sage observations about the nature of that age gone by. (Dave Barry's crack about beavers, for example.) The show has traced an arc in nearly 50 years, running from popular entertainment to the butt of cornball jokes to a self-indulgent exercise in nostalgia to something almost approximating a museum piece. Ward Cleaver in his age, like Cliff Huxtable in his and, to a lesser extent, Tim Taylor in his, is held up as a model of what his era regarded as a nearly-ideal dad. Even June Cleaver, who was once the object of feminist derision for her habit of doing housework in high heels and a necklace, (Barbara Billingsley, who played the role of June, explained a few years ago that she wore the heels chiefly because Jerry Mathers and Tony Dow, who played her sons, were both taller than she was and it didn't seem appropriate somehow for the boys to be taller than their mother) is no longer ridiculed as she once was. We're sufficiently remote from the Eisenhower-Kennedy years now that ridicule would seem gratuitous at best, quaint at worst. The June Cleaver jokes have all been worn out.

Despite its age, the show has that one element of timelessness going for it, to wit, the fact that children are occasionally quite impossible (like Monday through Sunday, for instance.) Since the basic predicaments of childhood haven't changed much in 5,000 years and probably never will, I can see Leave It To Beaver still being in reruns when our children's children are wondering what the heck their children did with that money they were given this morning for a haircut. Or why they have a baby alligator stashed in the tank of the hall toilet. Or how they could be put on a bus together and end up in different cities. Plus ca change, plus ca meme chose. Viva the Beav.

Poems, prayers and promises with the Provenzas

Photo on left: The father of the bride, flanked by both "best men" from his own 1982 wedding. From left to right, Oliver Glover, Jim Provenza and the author.

Photo above: The newlyweds, dancing the night away.


From my offline journal (often more candid than my blog) :

July 1

Sacramento

Jim and I finally connected by cell phone last night. The father of the bride was calling me from the wedding rehearsal dinner and was clearly in a hurry to get off the phone, so we kept it short. I just wanted to make sure he knew that we had arrived from Spokane and were in town. When I see him later today he’ll be wearing a tuxedo. That will be a first for us two “future astronauts” of long ago.

So Jennifer Rose Provenza, whose birth I recorded in these pages 23 years, six months and 18 days ago, is getting married this afternoon.

Although he’s frequently given to pithy thoughts and witty observations, usually having something to do with politics, in all of the years I’ve known her father I have never known him to be the overly reflective type, either drunk or sober. We were on different continents when his brother died, so we never really had the chance to get “down and dirty” on that subject, and in those few instances when it has come up, he has spoken mainly of its impact on his parents and offered speculation about the circumstances surrounding it. (To this day he suspects that Rick was merely having a beer-soaked reverie over the idea of suicide that evening, and that that police revolver’s going off in his hand was an accident. Well, yes, Colt service revolvers do have hair triggers.) But he has never really delved into its personal impact on himself, at least not in any conversation he's ever had with me. Odd that it should be so, given the fact that Jim worshipped his older brother to an extent that I have never witnessed in any other family. There wasn’t a quantum of sibling rivalry between them that I ever saw; indeed Jim seemed determined to follow Rick in his every ambition, in some cases succeeding where his brother failed, such as graduating from law school and yes, managing to stay married. But that’s Jim: I don’t think he has a mean bone in his body, and to use some extremely vapid ‘60s parlance, he has always been very “other-directed.”

But what must he be thinking now? Since I have no daughter of my own, I can only begin to guess. I do know what I’m thinking: I’m remembering an afternoon in Arroyo Grande, CA. Late October. Jennifer was not quite 3. Jim and Donna had driven up from Santa Barbara to visit me at my Aunt Jessie and Uncle Pete’s place, where I was house-sitting while they were on a trip to Europe.It was a mild afternoon and I think Jim and I went jogging together. The baby had been fussy before we left the house, crying and whining, and Jim’s mind was preoccupied with that, over and above other topics of discussion, as we walked back to the car. Ever the indulgent Baby Boomer parent, he insisted that we stop at the store on the way back to the house so he could buy her some cookies.I remember thinking this rather odd: in the household where I grew up, children were not rewarded with cookies for whining and crying. I doubt if such was the case in the house where Jim grew up, either. But there you have the key stylistic difference in the way two generations were raised: the Greatest Generation wanted its children (us) to have the educational advantages they hadn’t had. We were all browbeaten to get good grades and get ourselves into college, now that the G.I. bill had made college almost a universal entitlement and not the exclusive preserve of the well-off that it had been before WWII. But perhaps precisely because college wasn’t the Emerald City for us that it had been for our parents, we Baby Boomers merely wanted our own children to be coddled and spoiled as we, in our bottomless narcissism and self-regard, felt we should have been but were not. If we all live long enough, it will be interesting to see how Generation Y raises Generation Z. But in the meantime, good, bad or indifferent, there are the good old rituals to celebrate, the weddings and graduations and all that jazz that’s with us always, and interestingly enough, doesn’t seem to change that much from one generation to the next.

By the way, in addition to that afternoon in Arroyo Grande, I’m also remembering, from that same autumn, an apartment in Lompoc on whose living room carpet copies of Mother Jones shared space with strewn-about Care Bears books. Jim was just starting out as a lawyer, racking up some experience working for legal aid. I was a weekend guest on my way down to Los Angeles, and the sight of Mother Jones sharing the living room rug with the Care Bears struck me as the perfect metaphor for the transforming effect that Jennifer’s arrival had had on the lives of both of her parents, self-styled born-a-bit-too-late leftists who had been very proud of writing language about “working for social change” into their own wedding vows three and a half years earlier. I chuckled as I pointed out the strange confluence of reading matter to Jim. He was good-humored about it, as usual. Despite his passionate campaigning for George McGovern in 1972, (when he himself was still too young to vote) Jim managed never to take himself too seriously. Quite the contrary: he generally maintained an insouciance quite untypical of those earnest young savers-of-the-world who in our youth could talk about nuclear disarmament, and these days can talk about global warming, for as long as ten minutes without blinking once. Jim stopped wearing long hair after high school, switched from pot to liquor after college, and came away from the dreary 1970s almost as cynical about his own party as about the Republicans.

What he mostly was, by 1985, was a devoted family man, the doting father of a little girl. He kept his oar in politics, (today he serves on the Davis school board) but like those happy few among his fellow visionaries who are lucky enough to grow up and find personal responsibility as satisfying as public endeavor, what he mostly is, is a proud father.

I expect that the sight of this proud father in a tuxedo this afternoon may give rise to yet more, and similarly appropriate later-in-life thoughts. Jennifer was precocious as a performer: at age 3 she performed “Georgie Porgie” for a small but delighted crowd, of which I was part, in the middle of a children’s clothing store. I hear she’s going to sing Ave Maria today at her own wedding. She was also a strikingly pretty child, with enormous dark eyes and black hair. “She’s a wop all right,” her father said to me when she was a toddler. And I do expect to see a beautiful bride. Bring it on. Then go ahead and bring on old age for her folks and me, we of the generation so famous for being in denial about such things. Yeah, bring it all on.

End of excerpt from my "offline" journal. Back to blog...

Ah, yes, this business of being a trailing-edge Baby Boomer...(by “trailing edge,” I mean born in the mid-1950s, and hence, about 50 yourself now...)

Reading glasses. AARP membership cards. A bit of morning stiffness in the joints, necessitating extra stretching before you go for that 8 a.m. jog, which by the way is now two miles, not the five it used to be.

Weddings. As in, “of your own children.”

I don’t have any children. What I do have is a friend, born the same year as myself, (1955—and ever since we were in the 6th grade together, he’s held his February birthday over my October one as a badge of seniority) who has two: a boy, 19, who plays bass guitar and has a ring through his lip, and a girl, going on 24, who just came down the aisle all dressed in white.

Jim Provenza, the proud father of the bride, is my oldest friend. This coming October when I mark my 51st birthday, he and I will also mark 40 years of uninterrupted friendship. We met in October, 1966 just about the time I turned 11. The first away-from-school activity I remember us doing together was that Halloween’s trick-or-treating. Jim, as I recall, donned a homemade “spy” outfit. Secret-agent movies were big that year; it was the height of the “James Bond” craze. He decked himself out in a trench coat and snap-brim hat, with an ascot for effect. I was a commando, complete with black turtleneck, black wool cap and plastic machine gun.

I was (co)-best man at Jim’s wedding in 1982. He was best man at my (second) wedding in 2005. He was also present, having traveled 600 miles both times to be so, at the funerals of my mother and my younger sister. I was in Europe when his older brother died, but pounced on the phone and called him the moment I received an e-mail informing me about it. He called me the moment his daughter Jennifer was born, on Dec. 12, 1982. I was in Europe when James Jr. came along five years later, but promptly got an e-mail informing me of that event as well.

Jim’s and my ongoing friendship is remarkable for other reasons besides punctilious attendance on each other’s family joys and tragedies. We only actually lived in the same town for about the first year and a half we knew each other, and only attended the same school one year. Then his family moved, and then my family moved, and we never lived in the same city again. But we stayed in touch, diligently, by letter, by telephone, even for a while, when we were both in junior high school, by sending audiotapes back and forth in the mail. As boys we shared the dream that many boys of the 1960s shared: we aspired to be astronauts. We even belonged to an organization called Future Astronauts of America, which I would be very much surprised to learn had ever graduated a single astronaut. When we moved on to high school, Jim became a debater and decided to focus on a political science major when he went on to college. I got interested in writing and decided I would major in English (I changed that to journalism and history later.) About the time we graduated from high school, Jim wrote me a letter in which he noted the curiosity that we two “future astronauts” should have ended up as English and political science majors.

And that’s not all that makes our friendship special. Our respective politics couldn’t be more different. I’ve been conservative all my life, while Jim, following in the footsteps of his beloved older brother Rick, who aspired to be a 60’s-style Berkeley radical but slightly missed the cut by being born a couple of years too late, is a passionately committed liberal Democrat, yellow-dog to the bone. In spite of all this, Jim and I have never had an argument about politics that I can recall. When we discuss politics, we stick to the things we agree on, such as the fact that most politicians, of whatever ideological stripe, have their price, and it’s usually not that high, either.

I flew to Sacramento to attend his 50th birthday party last year; he reciprocated and came to San Diego to attend mine eight months later.

My wife Valerie and I flew to Sacramento last weekend, this time from our new home in Spokane, Washington, to attend the wedding, in nearby Davis, of Jennifer Provenza and Ian Wallace.

It was a beautiful and beautifully conducted old-fashioned Catholic wedding, a family production with about 150 guests in attendance. The weather cooperated splendidly, at least early on, with unseasonably cool temperatures in the upper 80s. (Later it heated up to 103, but by then everyone was caravanning down to the reception venue, which just happened to be on the Sacramento River delta where it was cooler.)

Thematically the wedding was an ethnic smorgasbord, a sort of haggis stuffed with mozzarella. Ian’s old-world background is Scottish, while Jennifer’s is pretty smoothly Sicilian—she’s a Provenza on her Dad’s side and her mother’s maiden name is Calabria. A Scottish-Italian wedding in a Catholic church: as the guests filed in and took their seats, a bagpiper tootled away at the church door. Later, the groom’s father, of the Wallace clan, belted out “That’s Amore” at a family “variety show” which followed the ceremony. (Bride and groom met in their dramatic arts program in college; almost everyone involved the wedding was some kind of performer.) Jim’s mother got up and sang “The Nearness Of You.” I was amazed. I’ve known Mary Jane Provenza as long as I’ve know her son, and I never knew she could sing solo. Jim has no musical talent whatever; it never occurred to me that others in his family might.

Jim’s “other” best man from his 1982 wedding, Oliver Glover, was also in attendance along with his new bride, Elizabeth. I had not seen Oliver since Jim’s wedding, and we almost didn’t recognize each other. We sat together at the wedding supper and got caught up on what each has been doing in the 24 years since Jim and Donna tied the knot on that courthouse lawn in Santa Barbara, from which I still have some pictures, showing all of us with more hair and smaller stomachs than now.

I don’t know whose idea it was to have the wedding reception at that beautiful mansion house in the delta. I still don’t know. But by the time we got there we had driven so many miles along so many twisting country back roads that I was certain we’d gone off the map. “Okay, whose idea was it to have this thing in Borneo?” I demanded when we finally got there. Jim wouldn’t ‘fess up, neither would he name the culprit. Typical of him. I do know this: he’ll be paying for that party for years.

It was a fine party, with plenty of good food and wine, and the bride and groom, who must have been dying by then to get out of their wedding-cake outfits and slip into Levis, duly made the rounds of every table, greeting all the guests. Nice kids.

I did, however, make certain that we left when there was still some twilight lingering to guide us back to the interstate. I didn’t want to get lost, go off the road and into the river, or have my wife and myself decimated by delta weirdos out of Deliverance. The newlyweds, their parents, grandparents and many other members of the wedding stayed overnight at the mansion. Most of the rest of us had to get ourselves back to civilization, and I didn’t want to be doing that in the dark, especially after a few glasses of chardonnay with my meal.

We flew back to Spokane, by way of Boise, Idaho, on Sunday afternoon. Our two-propeller puddle-jumper slammed into some nasty turbulence -- a thunderstorm -- on approach to Boise, and as we bounced about the sky, some of our fellow passengers screaming with terror, (or perhaps with delighted terror, as you might on the roller coaster at Magic Mountain.) I only hoped my old buddy would appreciate my putting myself through this so that we two old farts could celebrate his daughter's nuptials together. I am in fact no fan of flying, even in the best weather, and he knows that, too. But you do things for family, and after all Jim and I have been through together in close to 40 years, I'd say each of us qualifies for honorary membership in the other's extended clan.

I hear the newlyweds are honeymooning in Hawaii. Add another year or two to how long Dad will be working to pay for all this. But it makes sense to me. At the very least it's perfectly consistent with the ethnic theme of the occasion. Kilts, plaid and bagpipes for a roomful of Provenzas and Calabrias, followed by "That's Amore" and now, tiki torches, surfing and luaus?

What kind of wedding is that?

American, that's what kind.

Have a good time, kids. Don't forget the sunscreen.