So, when
you have a family like ours with active, involved members who were raised to be
their own persons, one gets what we refer to as “the never ending story of
Bianchi Place”. Or, for those too young
to know, there was a book in the late 1940’s known as The Never Ending Story of
Peyton Place. It was a, for that time,
really steamy story. It was so notorious
that my cousin, Frank, bought a copy but we all had to read it either in the
closet with the door shut, or under the blankets at night with a flashlight so
my beloved Aunt, with whom I was living at the time, wouldn’t catch us. Anyway, I got a copy not too many years ago,
settled in for a really hot read, and was truly shocked. Mainly because the book would probably be
appropriate nowadays for a young teen!
Society has truly evolved. Sort
of like the early 1950’s movie The Moon Is Blue. When it came out it was on the Catholic
Church’s, at that time, condemned list, and when I saw it recently it was the
most innocuous movie by today’s standards.
Really cute with a “double entendre” story line.
What that
book and movie have to do with my family is that as our society has evolved, so
has so much of our own personal understandings of so-called “cultural” issues,
or as is more succinctly stated in Catholic Church circles, “pelvic issues”. And, having one daughter who has a partner
rather than a spouse really causes one to re-evaluate one’s thinking on this
issue. 18 years ago when our daughter
brought her new partner home to meet us, we absolutely fell in love with her.
Consequently
this past 10 days has been a real roller coaster ride for our family with the
Supreme Court striking down major provisions of the Defense of Marriage Act
(DOMA), and the unconstitutionality of California’s Proposition 8. So, after much discussion between them the
two decided to get married this past Monday.
And this
is where the never-ending story part begins.
Remember the heat wave that hit the Southwestern United States? Well, we live in the area affected. This is important to remember because when
our daughter called to tell us their plans for Monday, my husband and I
rearranged our lives in order to be at the courthouse for their ceremony.
But, she
called at 7:30 Monday morning that they were going to dash down and get the
license, but didn’t know when the ceremony would be because her horse was “colicking”. So, thus began the wait. She called every few hours to give us the
update on the horse – she was walking him around every hour on the hour, in 110
degree heat, trying to get his insides to do what insides are supposed to do –
move. Finally, she called that they had
to call the vet to “tube” Buster. That
is run a tube up his other end from his mouth to let the air out so he wouldn’t
rupture something. Since I am not a
horse person, I didn’t even know that could happen, and it was something that
had never happened to Buster before, ever, and his insides decided to do it on
the day they planned to get married.
There was much discussion about changes in his diet necessary because of
both the colic and the hot weather, and on Tuesday we got a hallelujah phone
call that Buster had “done his thing” in the corral. Now this was not necessarily the news that we
thought we would get telling us that we should be at the Clerk-Recorder’s
Office that day for a marriage ceremony, but it was still good news.
In our
family we have learned to sort of roll with whatever comes along. The heat spell has broken, Buster is now back
to his old perky self, and a new date has been set for a simple family ceremony
at our place which is in a fairly remote location, with the subsequent food and
drinks at our house which is more bug proof.
If anyone
had told me when Bill and I got married years ago that we would be having a
marriage ceremony at our house for a daughter and her same-sex partner, and be
overjoyed with this event, I would have been totally appalled. But, just like our culture, we have evolved
with the times, as well.
I just hope that damn horse continues to do
its “thing.”
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