26 years ago -Our “big fat Greek wedding”

I remember a great deal about my wedding, which took place 26 years ago today.

If you were alive on June 17, 1994, you probably do as well: Pat and I got married on the same day OJ Simpson made a break for it in the white Bronco. I remember walking by the bar and seeing the wedding guests transfixed by the parade of police cars following OJ. We all were puzzled by how the football superstar with the megawatt smile and so much talent and charisma was behaving an awful lot like a guilty man.

The day itself had record heat, in the 90s. We had planned for a summer day in the 70s or 80s, not a heat index of 100.

Even those of us used to the heat were struggling, my sister Cathy had been been pumping me with fluids all day to be sure I didn’t pass out in the church. And my father was so hot he kept putting off getting into his tux, and so, when the photographer showed up for the photos, Mom and I had to yell at him to get ready. He was pacing around the house in shorts and a t-shirt less than an hour before the wedding.

Pat’s family had never experienced anything like the heat, an Irish heat wave is anything over 80; there is no such thing as air conditioning there. My mother-in-law’s gown would have been perfect for a fall day in New England, and Pat spent much of the day fretting over his parents. He kept telling them to drink water - a fluid they only used for washing dishes and showering - not drinking. He warned his parents to take it easy on the booze because drinking might be lethal with the weather. They were shocked, they were going to celebrate their only son’s wedding and a heat wave would not stop them.

To be sure, our wedding bore more than a passing resemblance to the movie My Big Fat Greek Wedding. Though my West Indian mother refused to have Greek music and insisted on serving a fruit cake (a West Indian tradition, which, coincidentally enough, is also served at Irish weddings.). My wedding gown had come from the same dressmaker who had made the bridesmaid dresses for Princess Grace of Monaco, but after that, it was the movie.

As a Catholic, Pat did not need to convert to Orthodoxy to be married in my faith. Catholics recognize Greek Orthodox weddings, but the rub was that the Orthodox Church would not recognize a Catholic marriage. When Vatican II opened up reforms in the church, the Pope had hoped the Orthodox leaders would reciprocate. But, as my father pointed out, the Greeks were too cagey. The Pope had dealt the Greeks a winning hand, only a fool would give it up. For the Greeks, the Great Schism is still a fresh wound.

Just like in the movie My Big Fat Greek Wedding, getting married in the Greek Orthodox Church with the candles and icons and incense and chanting was nonnegotiable to my religious father, and Pat did his best to go along. This was a time when Pat still attended church, so it was difficult to explain to his family. Greek weddings are a bit over the top even compared to a Catholic wedding mass.

[ As a compromise, Pat and I agreed to do a “blessing” with a Catholic priest in Ireland that next Christmas. The “blessing” would be false advertising; I was shanghaied. It actually was a second wedding reception with hundreds of guests at a hotel with sit-down dinner and a program selected by Pat’s mother, Olive. Pat feigned ignorance about the plan but I suspect he downplayed his role and was not exactly forthcoming about all he knew at the time. When we showed up at the church, I had to ask the priest if we were getting married again in Ireland. Divorce wasn’t legal in Ireland then, and as a practical woman, I just wanted to double check. When Pat heard me wonder about getting divorced, he looked me straight in the eye with one of his famous scowls: “I would never get divorced.” He was offended that I ever doubted him or us].

Besides the heat and OJ, the other drama was our priest going off script and declaring that marriage is supposed to be between a man and a woman. Pat was so enraged that Pat refused to speak to the priest or shake his hand after the ceremony. I doubt the priest even noticed the slight. Everyone just wanted to get the hell out of there. It was so hot in the church, Pat and I were not holding hands but sharing a washcloth we had dubbed the “sweat rag” to wipe away the perspiration pouring off our bodies.

In a highlight reel of the day, you would have to note Joe’s “best man’s speech.” (Just like in the movie, only people who are Greek Orthodox can serve as best man.) But as one of Pat’s dearest friends, Joe gave the toast. Joe warned the crowd and me that Pat’s great love was actually his hair. Joe regaled the crowd with all the frightening things Pat had done to his hair over the years, including a perm. Then, there was my father’s toast. Dad declared his relief at me finding a husband since “Maria had been on the shelf so long” (I was 26) and that Pat and I were like potatoes and feta cheese because “You would not normally think to put them together but they are quite delicious when you do.” During his toast, Pat’s father Paddy also shared his relief at Pat finding a wife. Paddy explained how Pat always reminded him of an odd, bachelor cousin of his who lived alone in a flat with too many cats.

It was funny to hear both our fathers tell hundreds of people that they were grateful their two strange children had found one another.

The other thing most people don’t know about our marriage is that Pat proposed to me less than 2 months after we met. To this day, I have no idea what possessed him to do such a thing, or why I accepted.

It was an unremarkable day in Chicago. Pat had made one of his truly horrible dinners (Pat was a desperate cook when we first met, under the tutelage of my family and me, we changed that. Pat would come to adore cooking and get quite good at it when he embraced the joys of olive oil, garlic and seasonings like oregano and basil). But he had cooked - wait for it - Ragu tomato sauce with a can of kidney beans over pasta (an Irish vegetarian in Dublin during the late 80s and early 90s had precious few options). One of the Lethal Weapon movies was on TV, I think it was the first sequel with Joe Pesci. Pat was holding the pot of Ragu and kidney beans and he just blurted it out: “Will you marry me?”

He had surprised himself with the words that came out of his mouth, and I remember asking “Are you serious?” He answered, “Yes.” Before he or I could snap out of this spell: I said I would marry him. We decided to keep it a secret, neither one of us had met the other’s parents. We worried our friends at grad school would think we were demented. My father would later admit to being a bit peeved that Pat had not asked for my hand. There was no ring, no flowers, no fuss: typical Pat.

Pat was not exactly cheap but he did not like to spend money on things that were not important to him, and jewelry, even an engagement ring, ranked among those trivial things. We were broke back in 1992 and Pat did not have a credit card and lived on a $10,000 stipend from his scholarship. There was no way he would spend six months salary on a ring just because the jewelry industry advised him to do so. So, after a rare fight where I pushed him to actually buy me a ring, we drove to an antique store in Evanston and I picked out the least expensive diamond ring : it cost $192. The ring was pretty, but small. Afterwards, we went out to Baskin Robbins and shared an ice cream sundae. I could tell that most people thought the ring to be rather unimpressive. My dad was horrified, he had spent $1000 on a 1 karat diamond for my mother back in the 1960s. Greeks take jewelry seriously. One neighbor of my parents could not hide her disappointment and assuming that I too must be unhappy with the ring said, “Well, the first ring has sentimental value.” The ring was old and delicate and did break a lot, I repaired it at least twice when a prong got caught on a sweater and I nearly lost one of the stones.

I once read a study about how the less expensive the ring the more likely the marriage was to be successful. What Pat lacked for in his taste in jewelry he more than made up for in devotion and friendship. When Pat said he would do something, you knew he would follow through. He was always on-time, attentive, and so wonderfully reliable.

To me, the most amazing thing about Pat was that he seemed to think I was pretty and smart and funny and utterly wonderful. For the first time in my life, I liked myself because Pat made it possible for me to see myself through his eyes. It was a revelation.

Pat also taught me how to be brave….long before the cancer and Cal.

He was just the sort of person who ran into the fire to help other people. If someone was sick, he would be the first person to show up at the hospital. When someone needed money because they were in real trouble, he would write the check. I think he might have only told one other person besides me this but when a young boy was murdered in Philadelphia, and Pat learned the family could not pay for the headstone, Pat sent a check for $2000 to the funeral home. We lived in a tiny house back then, but he needed to help that family.

Looking back, one of the reasons we did not tell people about our engagement was because it sounded sort of nuts. Pat was from Ireland, I was from the US, he had planned to move back to Dublin and teach at his alma mater: University College Dublin. There was an unspoken expectation that they would take him back after he finished his doctorate. I had never been to Ireland and had no desire to live there. Pat understood that by choosing me to be his wife meant he would not return home. For a time, my mother-in-law Olive sort of hated me for stealing her only son away from her. Olive would forgive me for this when she met her beautiful half-Irish/half- American grandchildren.

My own parents were taken aback by the match at first too. Living in New York and Boston during the 1950s and 60s, my Greek father and West Indian mother were terrified by the Irish immigrant neighborhoods like Southie and Charlestown where people like them did not feel welcome. In Ireland, my whiteness was far more questionable, my parents worried whether this might b a problem between the families. While there were some odd moments (like an uncle of Pat’s who declared that I was not “as dark as I thought you would be”) Pat’s father, Paddy was just overjoyed a nice girl was willing to marry his son with the crazy hair. Then, there was my mother’s fear that Pat was only marrying me for a green card. This conspiracy theory of my mother’s was a joke Pat would share on our wedding anniversary. He would say: “Tell your mom, I am getting ready to make my move, playing the really long game on that green card scam.”

Today, I woke up crying pretty badly. Just like I did 26 years ago, but for different reasons. At 3 am on our wedding day, I called Pat in a panic, suddenly questioning the wedding and the marriage and the collision of our families. Pat was tired, but calm and slightly annoyed that I was anxious: “it will be fine,” he said, “we are making the right decision.”

Last year on our 25th wedding anniversary, he gave me charm of a gold shamrock and two more charms in silver with the numbers 2 and 5. He took me out to lunch and promised that we would spend a day at a hotel near the ocean but he confessed to me he did not feel well and that being away from Cal worried him. He hoped that he could get a clean bill of health soon so he could take some time off treatment and enjoy a proper celebration of our anniversary. I had no sense that he was thinking that would be our last year together.

All I wanted to do last night was for Pat to come to me in my dreams so I could wake up for a split second thinking he was still alive. But, he didn’t. My brain has rewired to be keenly aware of his death…even in my subconscious.

Yet, I did wake up next to our youngest daughter sleeping soundly on Pat’s side of the bed.

And even though I long to hear Pat’s voice and kiss him, sleep beside him, and recount the funny stories from our wedding day, I can, instead, console myself with the fact that (yet again) Pat was right.

There was nothing to worry about, our marriage was absolutely the right thing to do.

We were two odd creatures who had improbably and magically found one another.