Dearly Beloved Continued

 

It was going to take some work!

I am including Sunday's section in case someone missed it.

*O*

We were sitting there grinning when Lou and Elvin and Bubby came home. They had gotten the eggs. Lou put them in the fridge in their recycled egg carton. Elvin took a seat and looked around. He smiled a bit like he knew something. Always, a real bottom-line kinda guy. He looked like he was adding up a list of numbers and getting a kick out of the answer.

Bubby came to a halt. He looked at Doug. He looked at me. He said, “hey what have you two been up to? This room is full of a real weird vibe!” He sat on his haunches waiting, big pink tongue hanging out.

Doug said “I’m trying to talk Jen into marrying me. She is thinking it over.”

“Figures,” said Bubby.

Lou yelled “What, you idiots can’t get married! No! That’s stupid!” and burst into tears standing in front of the fridge. “Where will you live? You can’t leave!”

“Here we go again”, I thought. “Maybe the baby thinks she will be abandoned somehow.”

I shushed her and held her and patted her back until she quieted down, sitting perched on my knees like a little kid.

I said, “hey Lou, we all have to grow up sometime. We can’t just always be kids together. Things will change. It’s up to us to make the changes good ones.” She wouldn’t look at me yet, but she nodded and got off my lap and took a chair. She wiped her eyes with the sleeve of her sweatshirt.

I smiled at my family and felt a great surge of happiness.

“Here we go,” I thought. “Oh boy,” I thought. “I want this,” I thought.

I stood up. I walked over to Doug. I said “I have given your offer serious consideration. I have decided to accept it. There is nothing wrong with it, and everything right with it!”

Doug stood up also. He said, “thank you for accepting my offer of marriage Jen!” We all, except Lou, laughed ourselves silly. It felt like playing. Lou rolled her eyes and crossed her arms. But she stayed in the room with us and that was a good sign with Lou.

Bubby seemed to think the whole thing was a lark. Have you ever seen a dog laugh? Well, they smile a lot, but laugh? I thought he was laughing.

Then there was some silly celebrating and we made dinner and didn’t get one other thing done that day. Lou and I went upstairs to bed and the guys, including Bubby, manned the front room.

Lou forgave me and we had a nice time yakking before sleep.

In the morning we all got together at the kitchen table again. We had to decide some things, such as who would perform this wedding and how much of a wedding it would be. I didn’t see a big fancy old fashioned wedding in our future really.

Doug said we should ask Roops, of course. Who else? Really there was no one else to ask. I thought a telephone would have been really handy about then, but no such luck. It was going to have to be in person, like everything else. I wondered if he would be happy, or what he would say. I wondered if the Lights would approve. I wondered if the Thumbies were still alive and would show up to cause trouble. I thought that they were probably still running around loose in Jerusalem hailing people with their particular greeting and trying to fix things.

We had to pick a date too.

This began to seem real.

There was a knock on the front door. We didn’t get many visitors, that was for sure. The last ones had been those Thumbie bros., weird double elbows and all! It was enough to make a person nervous.

I followed Doug out to the living room, followed by Bubby, who was not going to be left out of any further excitement. Doug gave me a quizzical look and opened the door.

Standing on the porch was Denise. She didn’t look happy. I wondered how she had found us.

“Can I come in,” she said. We moved back and said “of course.”

I said “what’s up Denise? Are you ok? Here, sit down.”

A little too thin, nervous and tired, she perched on the front edge of Dad’s old recliner.

“I thought you guys should know,” she said, “they’re going to close the store, I think.

“I heard that Doug was kind of the head man these days and I thought you all should know. I think that will be kind of a disaster for a lot of us. It takes time to grow gardens and raise chickens. Most of us live out of that pathetic store.”

We all sat down, slightly stunned. Doug said “this sounds like P-Sec is really losing their grip. I always wondered where they got the stock in the store anyhow. Do you know Denise?”

“Not in detail” she said. “Some of it comes from old warehouses I know, and some of it comes from a few suppliers that still operate here and there. I think P-Sec was paying them somehow. None of our stock is shipped from very far away, most of it is from relatively near by.

“But we haven’t gotten any new stuff for a few days, and they are acting strange up in the office. Today no one showed up, but one of them, who unlocked the doors and then left the store.”

Doug thanked her and told her that it was a very big deal and that we all needed to get serious about gardening, to try to feed ourselves. He was sorry that it had come to this. He said he would be thinking about the best approach and really appreciated the heads up.

Besides gardening and keeping chickens or rabbits or whatever, he thought we ought to mine some of the abandoned houses to see if there was still anything useful in them.

I got her a cup of instant coffee with some sugar stirred in and she rested for a few minutes. Denise said she lived not too much further down our road, which I didn’t know. Then she left to go home to her mom and baby.

“Oh great,” said Bubby. “Now where are we supposed to get dog food?”

“You’ll have to eat potatoes like us,” I said. He grunted and sat down.

Doug said “well we better pack up and go see Roops. We have a couple of things to talk about.”

*********

new section 

One of the worst things about living when we did was that we had to walk everywhere at first. Some people had horses and made wagons in the following years. Horses became quite valuable and were very well loved, if only to avoid the endless slow walking.

There were cars parked all over in driveways, on farms, and in parking lots, but there was no gas to be had. P-Sec had liberated it all and had used up most of it by the time I am discussing here. And in addition to that there was no phone service and only some people had access to a kind of stripped-down internet. We didn’t.

So, we all packed up our packs with a few things, except for Bubs who didn’t carry anything but himself, and we marched off to Milltown again.

It would have been stupid to pass the store without taking advantage of our presence there, so Doug and I stepped in to check it out and pick up a few supplies. Denise was at her check stand. She was right. The place looked worse than usual and emptier. We bought another dozen cans of dog food. I was sure happy Bubby still liked the stuff, even though he could talk. He was still a dog.

“Didn’t expect you right back,” said Roops. “Come on in! What’s up?”

Mrs. Steele greeted us from her usual recliner. The place looked cleaner than usual. I knew why too.

“Two things Rupert. First one is most important,” said Doug.

“I have managed to convince Jen here to marry me! We came to ask you to do the honors for us. You are the obvious choice, if you consent, and we would be very happy if you would.”

Roops winked at us! 

“Well, now, what a surprise! Well, not really. Hey, what a good idea.” He laughed a big guy laugh and headed for his big old chair. We all hurried in to our usual seats and sat also.

“I have never done a wedding,” Roops said, “but why not? In fact, I would love to! I have an old prayer book around here somewhere. Do you want to go the traditional route? Or do you want me to cook something up, or will you kids write something?” He looked almost too happy. Mrs. Steele announced that she approved also. She said she would like to help with anything that she could. I thought of those cookies she made instantly.

Now, of course, we had not even talked about that aspect at all. We had barely decided to do this thing. We hadn’t even decided when. More stuff to decide.

Bubby and Lou went out to the kitchen seeking a bowl of water for Bubs and a glass of water for herself. Elvin went in there too; I think he was giving us some space to talk.

One of the funny things about it was that there was no official way of getting married anymore. Most people just kind of decided between the families and themselves that it was a marriage and had a party and set up housekeeping together. No license. No church blessing. The churches had largely gone the way of most businesses.

Doug and I looked at each other. He said “how about next week? Maybe Saturday morning Jen?” That would give us about nine days to prepare. I said “ok. That’s fine with me.” I still felt shy about the whole thing and had trouble not feeling like we were pretending. I was a little embarrassed in front of Roops and his mom.

I told everyone that I liked the traditional service. So, we decided to use that. It felt real.

“The other thing is not cool at all Roops,” Doug said. “Last night at Jen’s place, Denise, a checker at the store came to the door with some news. She thought she should tell us that the store seems to be fading. They are not getting much stock in. It is even worse than usual and that management has made itself scarce in the store also. She thinks they will close when they run out of stock and can’t pay the staff. She doesn’t know why this is happening and we didn’t tell her. I wasn’t sure if I should yet.” Of course it was obvious to us that the cutting off the head of World Com was already causing a cascade of effects, including the loss of power for good old P-Sec.

“Doug, the Shorties tell me that this generation are going to have to become farmers, at least at first. I agree with that. Everything else, for the most part, will have to wait. Right now, with so few people, backyard gardens and hen houses will do, but as the population grows, and it will, we will have to group together and organize real farms and stores and distribution systems. All of that is pretty far down the road, but we have to be planning for it. We also should get what we can from abandoned houses and shops that might still be usable. None of us are going to be raising wheat and rice at first.  We will have to see if we can find things like that. It’s been a while, but you never know…” Roops raked his fingers through his beard, the way he did when he was thinking. None of us were happy about how this looked. But if this was the price of freedom, we were ready for it.



I poked my good friend Doug in his ribs and said “hey, what will I wear? What will you wear sir? I don’t have any good dresses and goodness knows what you have up in Arlington!” It was another thing to think about. I began thinking about my mother’s dresses and decided to take a look in her closet when we got home. I had not looked in her closet since she died. It had seemed like a violation.

Doug said he didn’t want to go back to Arlington. “It’s only clothing. I can wear one of your dad’s shirts and clean jeans. Your dress is more important to me.” We grinned sappily at each other.

Roops said he would find his old prayer book. We said we would figure out clothing. Lou would hold flowers. Elvin would hold the ring. About then it hit me that we didn’t have rings! Maybe my parents had left some behind. The first place we were going to have to mine was my own parents’ bedroom.

It seemed obvious that we would hold this simple ceremony in my home backyard. I began to wish we had a horse or two and knew how to ride them, because now we had to go home again and start to get ready for a wedding.

Everything so far: In the tenth year of the pandemonium.docx