My Big Fat Kansas Wedding
I got married in Kansas. To a really fine lady from France. We were already living together in New York so this was just to assure that US Immigration would let me keep her there in my bed. Truth, far more so to insure she kept me in her heart.
The path to marriage was made more difficult than necessary by me, although she foolishly agreed to it all. To get married we first needed a cab ordered to our door, an exceptionally rare treat. The driver warily eyeballed our destitute street.
He drove us to La Guardia for an early morning flight to Kansas City. This was on the Friday before Memorial Day Weekend 1979. We had minimal luggage since we lived with very few things then. Necessity in a poor tenement apartment in Manhattan’s East Village that had barely enough space for our bodies.
In Kansas City we borrowed one of my aunt and uncle’s cars, a 1971 Chrysler Imperial—great luxury for us who like most New Yorkers then had no car at all.
I drove us, radio on loud, for 300 miles. West west west for six and a half hours nonstop as we could make it, across more than three quarters of Kansas.
I went breaking the speed limits wherever they were. Speed ran in me, so I sped in glee. I had grown up with 80 mph.
Hurtling on I reveled in the scenery of home. My love held my hand.
I’d been born, reared a Jayhawker, anarchic, happiest with ‘no mountains in the way.’ I had been back East for almost three years yearning even in the stink and electric high of New York in the 70s for returns to the tabula rasa of my homeland, the unique American place where the prairie rises into the high plains.
The two of us sat in the big front seat ingenuous to what we were starting.
My bride to be I’m sure tolerated the pilgrimage mainly for my sake. And too because for her from her French point of view what the region lacked, much I’m sure to her, it still likely held some exotic appeal. She suffered the trip to be entertained by Americana. I think in that beginning she suffered me for the same reason.
We drove into the edge of Western Kansas, to Dodge City. It was not our destination for marrying. But close enough in that Zen land of fullness in emptiness. Mostly, it did have a motel where for far and wide around there were none at all.
Actually we were to be married in the small declining town of Kinsley 40 miles away from Dodge with too much in nothing between.
The reason we married in Kinsley, that I brought her there halfway across the continent, impelled by a homing instinct, was that my grandparents lived there. My parents had been married there back in the early 1930s. My mother was buried there. After I reached my prime as a true High Plains drifter I could claim any home it was Kinsley, Kansas. It still is in my old man’s self.
Late afternoon sun blinded our eyes heavy with long- travel fatigue until click they opened wide when the world went wild with color, turning into one of those psychedelic Kansas sunsets.
Our pain in the ass trip was necessary to me, selfish me, because I felt it imperative to give my father and my grandfather the pleasure they seemed to covet of marrying us. They were both Methodist clergymen.
I was already an angry atheist. So too my lover in her enlightened French way. All befell us inscrutably.
Being back for me gave a Babinski reflex. Myself at peace. To my true French woman alone in the wilderness it was not so easy, soon as she said a word everyone asked ‘where ya from honey.’ And then when told, “I never met anybody from France before. I just love French, it’s such a pretty language.”
Since Kansas City we’d done nothing but follow the old Santa Fe Trail. In my head a thousand ox or mule drawn wagons proceeded us all along to Dodge. Behind us came those who walked to lighten the wagons, all together like pilgrims on a path to Campostella.
Now and then an historical market would disturb the scene, ‘Wagon Ruts.’ So many had come through that the sign of their passage remained. Years before I’d seen a pioneer tombstone on a Kansas back road, ”She floundered by the wayside and The Angels Took her home.” Madonna of the Trail, cornball sentiment that nevertheless always gave me a lump in my throat.
Me and my headful of wagon tongues thwacking, the jingling of harness. Me part of that great passage onwards of ghost wagon trains. Going simply to be going.
Only five miles out of Dodge, towards dusk, I drove off the highway where I’d seen a sign announcing a Scenic Over. I thought to please my sweetheart who I assumed was bored. She claims she wasn’t.
That took us onto a dirt road. Suddenly ours became the only car in sight. Reaching the crest of a ridge we were truly amazed by the panorama. It spread below us, around us, enormous, the sun going down hooked on an edge of it. This was wide screen drive-in movie style viewing.
The sign read “World’s Largest Feedlot.” Doubtless it was. About a hundred thousand cattle milled below aimlessly looking about just like us, befuddled and searching for something to do.
That tourist attraction absorbed we went in search of something I knew we’d find, the motel. Where we had some fun.
Afterwards we drove through town looking for what New York in its glory didn’t have at the time. Tex Mex. It was real grease-dripping family cooking on the wrong side of the tracks. So good, so many beans that we were to be farting it out all through the next day, our wedding day.
Next morning, at long last, we drove on for Kinsley. I noted they hadn’t added a single curve since my last visit. Barb wire fencing ran along both sides of the highway, protecting us from mind-bending expanses of grazing land. A house too, now and then. A string of wind tossed telephone lines hugged to one side. On the other the tracks of the Atchison Topeka and Santa Fe railroad. No towns at all.
There I couldn’t speed because all the way we were stuck behind an empty but slow cattle truck—we knew where it had been.
One momentous event. A freight train charged past us. More than a mile long.
In Kinsley we bought out marriage license at the Edwards County Courthouse. The county-clerk lady said, “Dear, you have such a nice accent, I see on the papers you’re from France. It’s such a lovely language would you mind speaking some to me?”
From there we went in mounting excitement like children off to a fair. Off to visit grandfather’s house a very few blocks away. To where the little town abruptly ended.
We’d made it at last of our own westward trek. We were to be married in his living room.
The sign over the small front door of his small house read ‘Little Haven.’ He was Rev. W. F. Little, and maybe 5’5” so of course to me this was sensible.
My grandfather was 91 years old but hadn’t even lost a hair yet let alone his teeth or wits. He was a beaming, loving, virile man. Recently he had given one of my brothers a pack of rubbers saying he didn’t need them anymore. To me he gave cause to not despair, he does so now. I never heard him raise his voice, never utter a word in criticism or anger.
He had been an ordained Methodist pastor since 1908, preaching 7,800 sermons, baptizing 1655 infants, marrying 430 couples (we would be his 431st), burying 635 emptied out bodies,. These carefully kept statistics I found in his desk drawer after his death.
He pastored at 25 churches, mostly tiny, during his time across central and western Kansas. I was very proud of him even knowing that he would have stroked out if informed what my own life was like. He was not a successful parson, although he was a much beloved one.
Alma Lippoldt was his second wife. ‘Wee Willy’ married her within six months from when his most refined first wife, my grandmother Verna, went to her grave from a life of modest gentility. That was a period of mourning too short for gossips. My mother just laughed at her father’s haste. “He deserves it.” was her comment. Remembering Verna I understood what she meant.
Grandpa was second generation American, his father born in Ulster, northern Ireland. Scottish people originally.
Alma was second generation German. She still read her Bible in German. She was embarrassingly blunt to one and all. Expected to give out orders and have them followed. In everything great and small her way was the only way. But what a warm and caring woman, a distracting change from Verna for sure. She had been my grandmother for 20 years.
I called her simply Alma. German for soul. A funny name for a woman so no-nonsense. Alma was 91 too, still sturdy as her kitchen table.
Their home was locked into time. My time. I knew everything in it. Nothing ever moved there except for them in their precise, unhurried and unvarying ways.
Things I recall from their house: Grandfather’s wonderful roll top desk and his shillelagh acquired on his trip back to the old country in 1933; Alma’s curious throne- like black Chinese chair carved with foliage and dragons that some German ancestor had brought back to Prussia from the Orient; the large Victorian lithograph scene of Christ with a flock of lambs that I could always recall; and the plaster bust, which had fascinated me since childhood, of a child reading a book wearing an oddly shaped green cap.
As always in the bathroom I found the small vase on the back of the toilet kept filled with kitchen matches to be struck for sulfur to cloak the stink of bowels. Or perhaps to frighten off the Devil?
My honey and I both needed to light our matches votive in memory to Tex Mex.
Alma wore her best dress. Grandpa stood straight in his brown preacher’s suit. I was in my one suit, also brown. My inamorata looked so elegant in her beige and red floral dress.
Alma had pushed aside the furniture in her seven dwarves-size living room and dining room to make room for the gathering such as it was—bride and groom, two pastors, herself, my two brothers and one of their ex-wives, my aunt and uncle from Kansas City. A sum of ten in the house. It was a squeeze.
For an altar she had set up her ironing board in their living room draped in a white cloth. A Bible open on it pointedly to where Ephesians 5:33 can be found—“Nevertheless in particular let every one of you so love his wife even as himself.” I guess that bit of desert folklore from the vagabond, tribal saga meant me.
She had a corsage for the bride, a buttoneer for the groom. She’d even walked to the Kinsley Carnegie library to fetch a recording of love songs by Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy.
Alma loved only a very few of the living, but those she did she would do anything for. She’d come about as a living figure of the Old Testament.
There was growing tension in the Little Haven as we waited for my dad to arrive, the last of the expected. He was being driven in from where my bother Steve and he had spent the night, in Great Bend. We waited and at least for me with growing alarm.
My father was blind from occult hydrocephalus. He had had brain surgery in Kansas City to implant a pump in his head to circulate spinal fluid.
As for my brother Steve, his driver, he was a mess. An alcoholic. His wife, my dearly beloved Georgia, she with the one leg (see blog “Battle of the Haysville VFW”), also an alcoholic, had recently left him. Up until the wedding trip I had kept daily contact with him fearing he’d commit suicide. For weeks he’d cried to me on the phone while I tried in vain to cheer him on.
There was just reason to be concerned while we waited to get married.
But they did arrive. Steve with red crying eyes, my Dad like a Zombie. My guess is that Steve had bought some vodka in Great Bend and in booze addled sleep had failed at his watch. In the night when my dad tried to get up he’d taken a hard fall. I knew at a glance that the pump had stopped working.
Nevertheless the wedding proceeded, and despite a long epithalamion excursion, the scenic overview and Dad’s fall from his guardian angel, the ring at last slipped onto my wife’s finger.
A cheap ring, costing no more than a few dollars, very simple, she’d bought for herself alone at a Manhattan Woolworth’s. The sales lady saying ”Oh honey, I’m so sorry.”
The one sideshow was Alma scolding Steve in sotto voce —she’d unwisely assigned him responsibility for her program of Jeanette Macdonald and Nelson Eddy songs for our wedding soundtrack. Mainly we heard loud scratches of the needle across vinyl as Steve’s trembling fingers fumbled to do their best.
Married we got my Dad and us into a car. Steve had followed, he’d driven up nonstop from Alabama in an old car. Alan came in with diesel commotion in his new Mercedes. All ten of us were directed by Alma to Kinsley’s Dine Quick.
The Dine Quick was a metal prefab. Metal shell. To me it felt dining in a submarine. Beside it stood a tall sign proclaiming Midway USA, Kinsley Kansas, with at top an arrow pointing east—New York 1561 mi– and at bottom an arrow pointing west–San Francisco 1561 mi.
The Dine Quick was already full when we came in, with ranchers and farmers in town for their Saturday shopping. Everyone stopped chewing to stare at our entrance. Everyone knowing who we were, why we there. Small towns. Small talk.
Alma had reserved the back room for our nuptial feast. She’d also ordered a set menu for all: fried chicken, mashed potatoes, green beans (tasting of the can) and a square each of lime Jell-O imbedded with carrot strips and a few baby marshmallows.
Then to our surprise came a rather nice wedding cake. And that was all that mattered in thought and deed. Alma took the crown for our wedding, one which she keeps in our memory of her.
I knew we needed to get my dad back to Kansas City as fast as possible so after a lot of kissing and hugging we rushed off in the Imperial.
Hurrying along a few miles east of Kinsley, maybe by then “New York 1551 miles,” my wife turned to me in alarm, “Jonathan there’s a cop after us!”
In my rearview mirror I saw him. A Kansas Highway patrol cruiser riding my bumper.
No mercy from the law, not for newly weds, not for ailing blind preacher. My big fat Kansas wedding ended when the towering mean trooper handed me a big fat speeding ticket.