Apologies to the Hordes

Dear Mr. Horde,

I am very sorry for the way I made fun of you and the soon-to-be Mrs. Horde on the morning of your wedding day. I should not have been a part of this day in the first place, but when I arrived the night before for an unrelated visit with your housemate, my old friend X, he only mentioned your wedding in passing, saying “Mr. Horde and his old lady are getting married tomorrow.”

I'm ashamed to admit that, instead of taking this information to heart, I laughed at X's use of the dated expression “old lady,” along with how he continually called you “Mr. Horde” as opposed to Dennis, your Christian name. I did not consider that marriage is a serious step, even for a longstanding couple like you and your old lady, or that the soon-to-be Horde family might have a few last-minute things to take care of, or that you might like a little more privacy on the night before exchanging your sacred vows.

Although in fairness, Mr. Horde, given the actual hole in the wall between your bedroom and X's bedroom—a hole big enough for a snaggletoothed Chihuahua mix named Jesús to jump through—I'm not sure how much privacy you could reasonably expect.

Not to cast aspersions, but who was responsible for the Jesús-sized hole in that wall between the bedrooms in the first place? That would be you, Mr. Horde. You who lunged drunkenly into the sheetrock one night, putting one foot most of the way through and then thrashing on the rest of the way—perhaps out of anger at your own clumsiness.

Mr. Horde, I can hear you asking: What exactly made X and me so superior? No matter how justified we might have been in making fun of you and your ways, weren't we just as drunk the night before your wedding, smoking weed and blowing up a whole bunch of shit with fireworks—including an actual pile of shit that may or may not have been the work of Jesús?

Well, yes. In our defense, it somehow seemed clever at the time.

✣

Mr. Horde, I have a feeling you get it. When you’re someone like me or X—barely twenty years old, renting a room in Logansport from a guy who works as an orderly at the Indiana state mental hospital—it's easy to think, “I guess this is as low as it gets.” It's easy to think that life is like a movie in which the hero hits a low point or maybe even starts out at the low point, but at least has nowhere to go but up.

Making the most of the new entryway in his wall, X had taught Jesús to jump through the hole whenever he snapped his fingers. When it was open, that is, and not covered by X's poster of Peter Frampton, which was sometimes taped to the wall with its bottom edge actually overlapping the floor. This was during the years when X was pretty much still rolling with those little setbacks life deals a person. It was also in the midst of one of those phases when X was listening to a lot more Peter Frampton than usual.

Life can have a lot of low points. You can climb up and out and then sink back in again over and over, your life each time sucking a little more and a little differently.

For example: A few years ago, and for a very long time, I would wake in a heart-pounding panic on each and every rainy night. I’d hear the rain falling down through this one broken downspout on the side of our house, one that I had no stepladder long enough to fix, and no idea who to call to fix it. I could hear the water splashing against the plant life at the foundation of the house, and I could sense it seeping through the cracks in the foundation, feeding the gray, moldy expanse growing up the wall at the bottom of our basement steps.

For some reason, partly because I thought it would be too expensive to have someone else fix it, I let it go for more than two years and couldn’t bring myself to look into doing anything about it. But when I did get around to calling someone to fix it, it was so easy and so cheap, I couldn’t believe it.

I hope that I will never sink that low again. But I could definitely be wrong.

✣

Mr. Horde, the night before your wedding, I fell asleep in a T-shirt and boxer shorts on the sofa in your living room, which I recall as having all the the charm and character of a showroom at a Rent-A-Center. I was awakened at around seven o'clock Saturday morning when you came out to use the phone. I pretended I was still asleep.

“Hey,” I heard you say as after about the fourth ring, the earpiece of the phone emitted a few muffled swearwords in place of a greeting. “It’s me. So, I know it’s last-minute, but I just wanted to let you know, we’re getting married today. Yup. That's right. Twelve-thirty at the picnic area at Michener's Park.”

At that, I opened my eyes just a sliver. You were hunched about a yard away from me in a tank top and yellow sweatpants, a cordless phone in one hand and a cigarette in the other. Every now and then as you smoked, you tapped a bit of ash into a can of Diet Coke that was nestled in front of you on the Ottoman.

“Uh huh, I know it’s not much notice, so. Well, if you change your mind, it’s twelve-thirty. Michener's Park. Okay, bye.”

You made one call after another. “Yup, Michener's Park. If you can make it. Uh-huh. Well, I understand.”

You must have made fifteen calls, but they all basically went the same way.

Later on, telling the story, I’d invite my listeners to imagine you and Mrs. Horde alone with your officiant, just past lunch time in Michener's Park. I would describe a heavy-jowled country pastor in a dark brown suit, standing opposite you under the overhang of a picnic shelter, the rain sluicing off the corrugated roof in sheets. Both of you gazing distractedly into the distance, looking for late-arriving guests who will never arrive at all. On one of the nearby picnic tables, I theorized two damp cardboard boxes lined with plastic and stacked with untouched sandwiches wrapped in sweating wax paper.

“It must have been the world's saddest wedding!” I’d say.

In the unflattering light of the present moment, whose wedding doesn't look somewhat sad? The clothes gaudier and more unkempt, the haircuts more ill-advised, the faces sweatier and more inebriated than anyone remembers. Like any party, a wedding is at its best in anticipation, before it’s had a chance to fall short of our dreams.

The way it must have looked to you, Mr. Horde, as you rose on the morning of your wedding day to phone in your last-minute invitations.

Mr. and Mrs. Horde, if you are still together now, thirty years later, then Happy Anniversary to you both. It feels to me like a grand occasion, perhaps because I still remember my parents’ thirtieth, which happened around the time you were just getting started. It seemed improbable to me back then that two real people could stay together for so long.

Or if you’re not still together, which seems more likely, I hope you’re both a long way from your own most recent low points. Or that you think you are, which is all that matters.

And I hope you don’t remember me at all. At least not so vividly as I can picture you—and discern, in the image of your union, an omen of my very dodgy years to come.

❀

Image by Erik F. Brandsborg, via Flickr.