EPISTLE TO THE MANY MARRIAGES MADE IN GOOD FAITH
by MATT ZAMBITO
Dearly beloved, as we gather here today, I write to you as a happy, lifelong bachelor who’s attended more weddings than I’ve got sets of ribs; who’s recited extolling poems or holy texts during three ritual espousals; who’s dressed the part as an ushering groomsman on seven occasions; and who’s toasted and roasted a happy couple as a best man once. As such, I write with confidence when I type that a wedding can be to love what love can be to a lexicon: (that is to say) one small piece of it. However, I grew up going to the Dickersonville United Methodist Church, listening to passages preached from the pulpit and subsequently discussed in Sunday school classes (like Matthew 19:9-12, like 1 Corinthians 7:6-8, like Galatians 5:1…) that urged believers to eschew the institution. And I grew up reading comic books like 1987’s The Amazing Spider-Man Annual #21, which I owned and during which Peter Parker (the real name of Spider-Man) gets hitched to his long-time girlfriend, Mary Jane Watson: it seemed to me even then as if the most naïve and least heroic thing the friendly, neighborhood web-slinger ever did. And I grew up delighted by solitude in which to teach myself how to juggle, how to pen poetry, how to play the drums, how to supplicate in silence, how to never complain about a “better half.” So, while marriage (and its legal trappings) still seems to me to be a convoluted custom, and a dangerous venture (given the heinous number of uncharged criminals wedlocked), and a splurge of money, time, resources, and philia better spent on creatures dedicated to fidelity loyalty (namely domestic dogs), and while I aspire to not attend another set of nuptials, I nonetheless truly hope folks find the activity improves their lives.
By the time preteen me witnessed my Grandma Carmella trade troths with an Italian immigrant named Guido Pavan, I’d already gone to two prior conjugalities that also served to build my opinions. While historians place the first recorded evidence of a wedding to 2350 B.C.E. in Mesopotamia, my first as an audience member took place circa 1981 (I was just five), when my former babysitter and her new husband enacted their connubiality in a cathedral via a priest speaking through an electrolarynx: I remember sitting in a pew toward the rear of the building’s nave, filling with befuddlements (which never left my noggin) while I wondered what happenings were happening; what the gravelly things said meant; what exactly I was doing there. My second time attending a wedding occurred four years later in a forest’s clearing where a Jesuit united my overalls-clad cousin Jimmy[1] with his genial and barefoot partner; and my expansive extended Sicilian American clan beheld a hippie-infused, Holy See-sanctioned sacramental service, furthering my bafflement over bridals, a feeling only enhanced with each subsequent one I’ve beheld. When Grandma and Guido made their pledges in 1988, they were 72 and 73 respectively. Grandma was, by then, a former department store associate and a current divorcée from my dad’s father Salvatore Zambito, a paesan’ who rode a steamship to Manhattan’s “Little Italy” after an early childhood in Palermo. Guido was by then a retired professional photographer and a widower dwelling in Portland whom she knew from half a century earlier during their youths and young adulthoods in the city of Niagara Falls, the “Honeymoon Capital of the World.” Rather than by post, the two courted by phone for a few months before Guido proposed. Playing back the ninety-second private ceremony in my mind, I can see them standing before my nuclear family and the judge: Grandma in a cranberry-colored dress and a rose corsage; Guido in a dark brown suit, brown tie, brown shoes. Both Roman Catholics, the duo chose a closed-door jurist observance for reasons no one explicated to me, but I think they thought their religion forbade a remarriage; and yet, I think they thought a remarriage offered the possibility their long-lost fondness might really be savored and unified against spacetime’s entropy. As they swapped answers of agreement, I knew you were never too old to fight off loneliness. You were never too old to desire fealty. You were never too old to pine for plighted, interconnected companionship. In other words, you’re never too old to reach nearer to the Divine, because “too old” isn’t a phrase when dealing with love; with love, there is only just then, and just then, and then again, and then (and just like that)—after a pair of I do’s and by the pithy power vested by the State of New York—they were wed, newly.
Since that brief dictum made and authenticated a marriage, then I figured every individual word (frequently “amen,” often “hallelujah,” sometimes even—as this story will show—slang synonyms of “feces”) contained the potential for thaumaturgy; and so, I felt cautiously optimistic when—sixteen years after Grandma and Guido began; and following three stints as a groomsman for friends and one occasion of reading from Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians 13 (“Love never fails…”) during my maternal uncle’s union to my new aunt—my sister asked me to be an usher and to pen an epithalamium to be included as part of her October 2004 wedding. Because individual morphemes can function as incantations, because they might incarnate beautiful truths in each individual mind’s miniature and unique universalizing multiverse, because they meant mystical miracles might take place, I filled with delight when I learned their rite would include a back-and-forth of solemn promises, a sermon by a Lutheran pastor, a recitation of “The Summer Day” by Mary Oliver, Nora Jones’s song “Come Away With Me” sung by the maid of honor, a selection from an anonymous Buddhist text, and my poem (which includes the sentence “Along the slopes, one hundred / prairie larks, singing a glossolalia / we long to harmonize, / harmonize.”) delivered by my sister’s professional mentor from grad school. That she pronounced “glossolalia” about as incorrectly as one could—twisting its accents around, putting stresses on the wrong syllables, managing to add an o, subtract an s, and fruitfully multiply the l’s, making the term into exquisite gibberish—fulfilled the very guarantee of its meaning before us. The setting for a wedding makes its meaning, too, and we stood outdoors inside Niagara Falls State Park and could see the American Falls falling in America right there: morphing itself, smoothing the rocks, feeding seabirds, misting the air, iridizing sunlight, the same sunlight as when Niagara’s trio of wet tumults started over twelve millennia earlier and not the same sunlight simultaneously, the whole scene as if it were speaking in its own tongues. Geography, topography, geology, limnology—they remain ever-changing over the eons: with humans, though, as Emily Dickinson wrote in an 1874 missive to an unnamed cousin (using the salutation “To the Misses”), “We turn not older with years, but newer every day.” A couple-hood can do that, too: instead of aging us, a combined adoration can apparently leave some of us refreshed and reborn with every linear instance. While the origin of wearing wedding rings remains hazy (some attribute the ancient Egyptians, some the Greeks, some the Etruscans, some the Romans), we do know people believed that donning them on the finger beside the pinkie began because of a goofy, yet sublimely idealized, belief that digit contained the vena amoris (trans. “vein of love”) carrying blood directly to the heart (it doesn’t). And as the service (held a 1,230-yard walk from the Bridal Veil Falls) reached the trans-theological apex of synergized spirituality, and as the pastor blessed the rings, she fumbled, then dropped them; and then (as if imbuing them through her as an intermediary with the Ethereal Lifeforce, that which thrives in even Earth’s stinkiest bacterial funk), she first clearly blurted “Oh,” forgetting she was mic-ed up and amplified over the soundtrack of cataracts cascading and international tour groups doing their ineludible aahing and oohing, and then she blurted out “shit,” but a holy one at that.
While lacking the same consecration as my sister’s and brother-in-law’s rings, the historical genesis of the moniker “best man” is murky, and its tradition in Western weddings likely developed parallel and independently in various subcultures over millenniums. According to the 1910 book The Origins of Popular Superstitions and Customs by T. Sharper Knowlson, one possible beginning might “trace an origin in the notion of defending the bridegroom against a rival who might carry off the bride.” Of course, in 2005, when I agreed to be the best man for Jason, a fellow goombah whom I’d known since second grade, I didn’t expect I’d fight off a rival and defend the wedding party with my trident and torch, but neither did I expect it would include my telling the bride and groom to zip their lips, and yet include my telling the bride and groom to zip their lips it did. While the maid of honor, the couple of the hour, and I all knelt as instructed before the altar, the priest performed the eucharistic prayer as part of the liturgy, trusting his words channeled the Word, causing a metaphysical transubstantiation to happen as the climax of the mass; at the exact same time, Jason and Effie, his missus-to-be would not stop blabbing. I glanced at the front pews filled with their closest relatives and got looks that told me to put the kibosh on their animated patter and prattle. At this point, having rented my fair share of black suits and having donned my fair share of boutonnieres, I knew that to be a best man was to keep the groom from screwing up, requiring me to have two shoulder-angels, not just one balanced off by the devil on my left deltoid, the one twerking his adorable scarlet bottom. Due to circumstances including their higher educations, respective career paths, and the ripple effects of 9/11 (one then resided on Manhattan Island; one on Staten Island), this couple—practically email pen pals at one point—spent the bulk of their eight years of dating at long distances (living 680 miles apart for three full calendars), so I thought maybe they were gabbing because they couldn’t believe they were in front of one another right then and able to gab and then would be henceforth also able to gab. Despite their delight, I’d never felt more compassion for a cleric, for he surely could hear all this flibbertigibbety jibber-jabber transpiring right before him while he tried to concentrate on his day’s soulful zenith. So, I turned toward Jason and whisper-mouthed: “Quit… fucking… talking.” I leaned my head forward and bulged my eyeballs out, before adding: “He’s making Jesus.” Jason nodded. I heard him tell Effie that I said they had to stop talking, which meant I wasn’t the only one who heard him tell Effie that I said they had to stop talking. The priest (who’d hallowed himself to the Heavenly host and the Holy Ghost) kept going, and Jason and Effie began chitchatting again. In their defense, I didn’t try to intervene: their love—unrivaled that day—carried them away, beyond balming psalm, beyond interstellar intercession. In that moment of agape meeting eros, if accounting for physics, biochemistry, ontology, neurology, poetics, and pheromones, then I would’ve been right to think (and I seem to remember thinking at the speed of neurologic-electricity something like) this: This is them; they are each other’s. Two souls, they were, communing into a future, one filled with their real presence, at once mysterious and damned verbose.
Speaking of the real, data compiled by Sally C. Curtain and Paul D. Sutton for the National Center for Health Statistics and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention indicates that approximately 4,394,000 Americans got married in 2007, more than the then populations of Delaware, Alaska, Wyoming, North Dakota, South Dakota, and Vermont… combined. Data compiled by yours truly indicates that at only one of the 2,197,000 weddings that year did I sign a ceremonial ketubah in a Boston-area country club. Said Jewish marriage covenant represented part of a union between my buddy Ben (whom I’d befriended when we were both four-year-olds) and his fiancée Hannah, a dyad of medical providers who helped prevent and control disease. Prior to the traditional Sheva Berakhot; prior to the exchanged vows under the chuppah; prior to the glass stomped by Ben (a convention bizarrely tied to the need for the groom to break his bride’s hymen while consummating the whole shebang) and the “Mazel tov!” (trans. “The hope that you have the good luck that comes from living under a propitious constellation of stars visible in the night sky,” as defined by Rabbi Richard Baroff, writing for the Atlanta Jewish Times) shouted by a devout crowd as congratulations; and prior to the cover band’s performance of the nigun “Hava Nagila” (trans. “Let us rejoice!”) while those there to celebrate danced the hora (the single most fun you can have at any reception), Ben and Hannah asked me to affix my signature (during a separate, intimate ritual) on the decorative agreement that they’d planned to display prominently in their home, an optimistic document of financial fidelity and corporeal carnality in the name of that which is sacred. In a secluded room, an hour before the full proceedings, the rabbi explained the moment and then recited the requisite orison before a group of ten or so. After the brace made their monogamy official, I made my cursive forename, middle initial, and surname as my witness to their commitment, a commitment made across the divide of consciousness, one made communicating with Yahweh as the translator, a compact that acted as a testament to their obligement, striving to provide us a glimpse of Eden’s felicity. When the tip of the blue pen held by my right palm and fingers—the same way as when scribbling a haiku about pigeon poop plopping on a mallard’s mazard; when doodling ideas for vulgar graffiti I lack the gumption to tag; when addressing vacation postcards that send “Greetings from sunny Topeka!” with probity—made first contact with the artful parchment, it acted as proof of our collective wish that their worshipful merger might be seen as good (as with the waves of photons on Creation’s first day) by even the discerning eyes of Elohim.
Now, as an intimate spectator aware how Heisenberg’s indeterminacy principle might apply beyond the subatomic particle and how the Hawthorne effect might impact the average proton; as an invited outsider spying on the inside; as a reader, a speaker, a tuxedo wearer; friends, as someone always a groomsman and never a groom, I do care about seeking after the Alpha with penitence and the Omega with ebullience, so I care about spousals less than as I cared about portaging a canoe over beaver dams in the Adirondacks; about going to the ‘96 World Series held in Yankee Stadium; about smoking hashish in Idaho one starry July night until it seemed to me as if I might be a perpetual motion machine; about participating in fantastic erotic shenanigans with a Slovenian woman I met in Ontario; about rescuing and getting rescued by my Black Mouth Cur, Sadie. That said, I sustain a wish that all who want to stay together do so. At the same time, I’m confident that wedding planners keep divorce lawyers in business and that business is booming. While limited, the weddings I’ve attended have let me better understand a brand of romantic unions (“If ever two were one, then surely we,” wrote Anne Bradstreet to her Puritan spouse) and public professions of passion (“I laugh and fall dreaming again / of the desire […] / to move openly together / in the pull of gravity,” writes Adrienne Rich in “Twenty-One Love Poems,” which I orated in my college roommate’s ceremony) more than they let me comprehend property contracts as part of the process decided by a country that legislates limits on love far beyond the societal requirement to ward the vulnerable. While we can agree that citizens should be free to impede their personal liberties, alas, I seem to be missing the willpower necessary to forsake all others, and I possess no veneration for nations. Instead, my independent vow is to maintain a solidarity with humanity; an empathy for fellow earthlings; and a loyalty to both the sovereignty of each sentience and the quantum entanglements of the known universe. I propose you ally with me on these ideas. So, to those blisses initiated by officiant, to those promises of happily-ever-after consummated, to those betrothals becoming nuptials, and to those conjointments of the holiest of matrimonies, yes, to those many marriages made in good faith (and to those unmarried; and to anyone else, too), I give you my solemn word that I do believe we ought to all believe in the kinetic potential of any devotion, for better, for worse. I do. Sincerely, I do.
[1] Some real names and minor details have been masked to protect those generally innocent.
author pic here
Matt Zambito is the author of The Fantastic Congress of Oddities, and two poetry chapbooks, Guy Talk and Checks & Balances. His nonfiction has appeared in Fugue, The Inlander, and The Ohioana Quarterly, and new poems appear in swamp pink, Tampa Review, Heavy Feather Review, Slipstream, The MacGuffin, and elsewhere. Originally from Niagara Falls, he has lived in Ohio, Idaho, Washington, and New York, where he now resides with his rescue dog, Sadie.
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