Growing old makes a person feel, old. One morning last week, I looked at my wife Marian sitting on the couch across from me, and realized I’ve been with her for most of my adult life.
Here’s how we met. Fifteen years before the end of the 20th century, I was working as a part time Bingo caller at the Mystic Lake Casino in Shakopee, Minnesota. Back then, the Casino didn’t look like the cornfield Las Vegas it does today. Even though it was in the boonies it was a busy late night hot spot where you could buy tax free cigarettes and booze, or visit the massive bingo hall which is where the real action happened.
I got a job as one of its bingo callers, entertaining hundreds of people each afternoon. Players would sit at long tables with their printed game sheets and brightly colored blotters. Those playing bingo in the middle of a weekday afternoon were mostly older women who were dead serious about the game, which didn’t match my natural performing joviality. My style of calling a game was to add humor, and self-effacing commentary, two things not normally associated with professional bingo calling. For instance, I’d learned to palm a bingo ball I’d pulled from the expensive tumbler, and made it look as though it magically traveled from one hand, suddenly appearing on the board, lighting up the number on various electronic signs around the hall. I also learned that if I pinched a bingo ball in just the right spot, it would shoot away from my fingers, and bounce around under the tables, forcing a floor worker to catch it and bring it back. I used to do imitations, character voices, including an imitation of speaking in slow motion. So funny. So, so funny.
I was fired only a few months after I’d started. My boss, a tall, balding man with a triangular shaped head, ears that seemed to move independently while he talked, and a mouth missing several teeth told me “This job isn’t for you.” Unfortunately, that was the case with nearly all of my jobs in my youth. If work wasn’t fun, what fun was it to work!
While my luck ran out on Bingo, there was a spectacular new paramutual horse racing facility being built a few miles north of Mystic Lake, and someone, oddly, had recommended me for a job managing the entertainment for a night club being built next to the track. Apparently, someone had seen me doing my hysterical but ill advised bingo shtiklach and called for an interview.
I was surprised when I got the job. I’d never worked in a night club before, in fact, I rarely visited one before this job. It turned out to be an astonishingly successful club, a place simmering with youthful energy. The entertainment and bar staff were all young, happy and attractive, and several times a night the entire staff would dance on tables and bar tops in orchestrated pandemonium. It was wild and fun, and I was in the middle of it.
During that time, my first wife and I became separated, and the club became the personal and professional center of my life. That’s when I met Marian. She was a bar customer, out with some friends, and came up to request we play a dance tune she liked. Memories can’t be trusted to reliably represent the past, they’re fragments at best. But I think my memories of her that first night are as accurate as any in my life. She was well dressed, in heels, her hair confidently short and done, and she carried herself like someone with purpose. She was also poised and attractive and I would look for her each night hoping she’d come back in. She came out several evenings, with different friends, and would always come up to the DJ booth to say hi.
Hair and fashion of the times - Marian (21) and some friends dancing at Winner’s Nightclub.
I wasn’t sure if she would go out on a date with me, after all I was still married and outwardly hopeful for reconciliation with my wife. But, when I asked her out she agreed. We’ve been together since, and have spoken to each other at least once a day, every day we’ve been together. After several years as a couple, we decided to get married.
On our wedding day we shared the Sarum Rite, out of the book of Common Prayer. This passage includes the traditional wedding vows, “to have and to hold from this day forward, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness and in health.” Thinking back, the words didn’t matter to me. Sure, we think, gonna be rich, maybe we’ll be poor, we’ll get sick sometimes. The have and hold stuff, what does that even mean when you’re in your 20’s? It sounds good, a little romantic even.
Wedding Day / Murphy’s Landing
Marian and I could never have imagined what would happen to our lives in 2018, when we shared those vows more than 35 years earlier. And, even as we were pulled into the miasma of a ruthlessly false accusation, we weren’t thinking about our vows, because they didn’t matter, they were part of a lovely ceremonial moment on our wedding day. But I don’t remember them now, and don’t need to. They don’t animate my heart, they aren’t navigational charts.
Murphy’s Landing / 2023
In the dark days after my arrest Marian took on the unenviable task of keeping me from disappearing into depression and suicide while simultaneously becoming something like a paralegal, organizing every detail of the case, making sure nothing was left out. She was also attacked online, accused of aiding in my sexual harassment or rape and should be thrown in prison with me. But, she never flinched from defending me or our marriage, or her assessment of those involved, one of whom was once her closest friend.
Right before our first court date, at the very beginning, her employer let her go without warning. She told me how she fell to her knees in the hallway outside her boss’s door, sobbing, begging them not to do this. Because my career was destroyed, hers was now the only income we had, it was our health insurance, and everything else we needed to pay for, including escalating legal costs. It took her months to find a new job, and during that time she never wavered, she kept our home emotionally stable, all the while I was flailing. I was so broken and weak, and if she was anything other than strong, kind and generous, she never let on.
I used to think saving someone’s life was an episodic moment when a person intervened, heroically sometimes, like pulling someone from a burning home, a car wreck, administer CPR, save a drowning person from a raging river. But, Marian saved my life countless times, over four years. It was these small things — wanting to go for walks with me, to walk the dogs together, have a picnic to get me away from the darkness that had enveloped our home. She encouraged some friends to build a studio space for me. Telling friends to call, encouraging people to visit. I was so down, but she was always there to remind me of what good there was in my life, again and again. She told me about the evidence, how solid our case was, working with my attorney so closely, and a million times “We’re going to be okay.” And a million more, “I love you.”
One of the darkest days of my life was the day the Minnesota Department of Human Rights put out a press release that declared me guilty of rape. I knew there was an investigation happening, but I was completely blindsided by the report. Standing in our living room, reading it, I started to scream something I said frequently whenever some ugly new twist emerged. “They aren’t going to stop until I’m in prison or they kill me!” Marian held me until I calmed down, and repeated her mantra, “We’ll be alright. You’ll be okay. They have nothing.”
If not for her I might have succumbed to the overwhelming desire to relieve the churn of pain and fear I was caught in. I’m not entirely without inner strength and resolve, but we pulled together. She never wavered, she never doubted, even when I was close to the edges of a horrible darkness.
Shakespeare wrote that love alters not with his brief hours and weeks, that it bears out even to the edge of doom. That’s a popular vow, and certainly better written than the one we said at the altar. I guess what I’m saying is words, however well written, are still just words on a page.
It’s a mild late spring evening, the windows are open and the song of crickets is tumbling with a slight breeze. I’m looking at her again, still on that couch. Thirty-five years since a church, since a passage from a prayer book, since vows we wrote ourselves and can’t recall a word of now.
What I remember is her sense of humor, her fearlessness and resolve. But it’s the dark passages I recall most vividly: her hand on my back while I raged, her calm assurances when the nightmares came. “We’re going to be okay,” she said, over and over, “it’s alright.” We never spoke of the vows. We didn’t need to. They were already our marriage.
