For the next few weeks, True Stories Well Told is featuring essays by writers in my “Start Writing Your Life Story” workshop at the Art Lit Lab in Madison in Fall 2023. My next workshop there starts in April 2024.

By Renee Lajcak

[Midnight in my hometown of Oshkosh, Wisconsin. The phone rings. ]

“Hello?”

“Renee.  It’s Michelle.  Can you send me my birth certificate?”

“WHY do you need your birth certificate??”

“I’m getting married in a week!”

“To WHO?”

“Didn’t I send you a postcard?”

Michelle is my older sister and is known to be rather impulsive, so the conversation above shouldn’t have surprised me as much as it did.  I always admired her spontaneity and devil-may-care attitude.  It seems that Risk equals Reward for her, and life is lived to the fullest if she grabs the bull by the horns, grabs the brass ring, grabs life by the cohones.  Not surprisingly, her favorite poem underlines this same philosophy:

If of thy mortal goods thou art bereft,
And from thy slender store two loaves alone to thee are left,
Sell one, and with the dole
Buy hyacinths to feed the soul.

I am the opposite.  I still regret not going to a Bruce Springsteen concert in 1982, instead convincing my then boyfriend that the money was better spent on rent.  In the 90s, Michelle told me how she admired the way I just picked up and moved to Indonesia.  In actuality, I had planned it for over 5 years, in order to get out of debt, learn to speak Indonesian and find a job there.  The move to Indonesia was a major step-by-step plan.  That’s how I roll.

Now Michelle is not flaky or haphazard.  She is also a planner and a list-maker, but her instinctive joie de vivre is a major driver.  This can be as exasperating as it is endearing. 

Her wedding was a good example.

Two weeks before that midnight phone call, she had met a man on the Amtrak train while heading out to Seattle and fell face-down in love.  The two of them skipped and leaped on the glaciers of Mount Rainier under once-in-a blue-moon, clear blue skies.  Michelle explained that on Mt. Rainier, cloudy days were typical and, thus, these rare sunny days made it clear that they had to get married.  I went to the County Clerk and sent her the birth certificate.  

Was she jumping the gun?  Or was it a daring, confident move on her part to marry someone she had just met 3 weeks before?  Whichever it was, her timing was off.

When I got the phone call, our parents were driving and taking trains straight north far into Canada.  That’s where they were. Brother Ken and his wife Mary were on their vacation driving straight south to New Orleans.  That’s where they were.  And I was leaving in a few days with my best friend to bus to the East Coast where my brother Bob and his girlfriend Sandy lived.  So where does Michelle decide to get married?  On the far west coast of the country.  On Mount Rainier.  

My mother was the only one to go from our family, and she wasn’t too happy about it.  When the pastor droned, “Should-anyone-present-know-of-any-reason-that-this-couple-should-not-be-joined-in-holy-matrimony, speak now or forever hold your peace,” Mom spoke up.  She told the pastor, “Michelle should’ve gone to church more.”  What brought on that absurd comment? Maybe it was the fatigue talking.  Mom had just had a long trip into Canada, jumped on a plane to Seattle and climbed a mountain. Or maybe it was her roundabout way of saying that religion could have given Michelle the circumspection and maybe even the better judgement that this present situation seemed to require.  But Mom showed up at that wedding, showing her love and support, and I give her credit for that. Because I didn’t. My dear friend Deirdre offered to switch our East Coast plans to a trip westward, and go to the wedding instead, but I just couldn’t suddenly change my plans, proving that I lacked the spontaneity of my sister.  I also doubted the staying power of Michelle’s sudden engagement.  To me, jumping headlong into a wedding seemed more than likely to result in a short marriage.  I thanked Deirdre for the offer to go West, but with a sense of smug self-assurance,  I added, “I’ll catch the next one.”  

So was Michelle’s an unpredictable, yet intuitive decision? Was it daring and confident, or just the brash result of the explosive mix of passion, adventure and good weather?  As of 2023, Michelle has been married to Michael for over 40 years.  Decades of ups and downs, patience and joy.  They have two amazing daughters and two grandchildren.  Michelle and Michael have hung in there together, and are still in love.

35 years or so after they got married, I finally got ready to tie the knot myself.  When my brother-in-law Michael found out, he immediately announced, “I’ll catch the next one.”

©2023 Renee Lajcak

Renee is a newly retired English language teacher who has taught in several Asian countries but now enjoys her woodsy backyard the best.  She loves the connections made through storytelling and teaching conversational English, but writing about memories allows her to go inward to contemplate the good, the bad and the ugly.  But mostly the good.