These are the good old days

Last March I was driving my yellow car through the filthy remains of our long winter. Our whole New York region was in that stage of repose where the snow has grown stale, the bare bushes stick skeletally out of it, and very little cheer remains to the landscape. My car crawled along a black road, like a yellow flea along one of the county’s dirty elbows. My mother and I were going to visit friends who had promised to help us stuff my wedding invitations.

The trip was, of course, one of many goodbyes—not just to the people, but to the memories housed in the land itself. On the right I passed the home of a girl from kindergarten I used to sit with on the school bus, whose smile had reminded me for all the world of the Kool-Aid mascot’s. I know nothing about her now except that she is engaged to the loquacious elementary school boy who used to sit in the front seat. I don’t think I would recognize her if I saw her again, but the hill where she lived hasn’t changed.

The friends we visited became our friends long before my birth. They had informally adopted my father when he was new to Christianity, and in that way became my honorary grandparents. When we arrived at their home, we cleared the table and arranged the 300 long envelopes into rows. We folded, threaded, stamped, and stuffed—careful lest the envelope width exceed the rigid dimensions for the cheapest postage.

While I shook glitter and confetti into an envelope, Janey, the family’s matriarch, passed around an album of her own wedding photos. Her mother-in-law—aged 99—peered over her shoulder at a picture of herself and exclaimed, “Why, that isn’t me! I don’t know how I could have had my hair done that way!”

The mother-in-law, whom most call “Mud,” had obscured her present hair—white, soft, and short—beneath her characteristic turban. Her skin, over an almost-century, had gathered in millions of tiny laughter folds and stuck.

Janey told Mud she was going to let me try on her wedding dress, and give it to me if I wanted it.

“No!” said Mud.

“Why not?” asked Janey. “Am I gonna wear it again? I can’t put my hind leg in it!”

Janey’s wedding dress was one of the first I tried on. But as I slipped it over my head I realized with horror that I would not have to reject it on the basis of style, but because it wouldn’t button. In other words, I couldn’t put my hind leg in it, either.

In the background, the TV buzzed with some reality dance show. As slender women twirled their bodies across the screens, I consoled myself by realizing that though they looked flawless they probably felt as imperfect as I did at that moment. The dress that wouldn’t button disappointed me because I thought engagement should be the most beautiful time of my life. Then I dared myself to have grace. For if I could not care for myself, how could I ever care for someone else?

It’s a shame, as Andy noted in the finale of The Office, that you can’t know you’re in the good old days until the good old days are gone. I hope the kindergarten girl from the bus, wherever she is, isn’t tarnishing her engagement by worrying about her waist.