The Oak Table, the Rock and Roll Room, and the Altar
When I first brought Cheryl from her house on Carriage Drive to mine in Enfield, it was like moving between two different planets. At her place, the basement was cold and scary, people were cycling in and out for drug deals, and there was never enough food. Then she walked into my world.
At my house, dinner was served at 6:00 on the nose. The whole family sat around a big oak table. We had a color television—something she’d never even seen in a home before. She saw my bedroom downstairs, a total collage of every rock and roll album that mattered, a room that literally vibrated when I was rocking out. She was moved by it because it was the total opposite of the disaster zone she was surviving.
We eventually made it to the altar at a Catholic Church in Broad Brook, Connecticut. I was 22 and she was 18. We had a hundred guests watching, but before the priest could even get started, the weight of it all hit me. I passed out right there while we were kneeling side-by-side. My best friend had to carry me back to the rectory.
The priest came back and told me, “Mr. Jeff, you’re going to need to come back out there, take your wife by the hand, and walk down that aisle.” I did it, but the service was basically over. As we walked out, the church was murmuring. My smart-ass Aunt Brenda was one of the first to greet us at the back. She looked at us and said, “I thought it would last a little longer than this.”
She was wrong
It took me 70 years and a wrinkled papyrus found in a kitchen cabinet to realize that my mother knew it would last. She saw a girl from a broken home and a boy who loved her, and she put us both on a pedestal in that gold and blue frame. She saw the “Era of Cartouche” beginning long before I did.