This week’s column is by Megan Buchanan-Cherry.
After having lived very happily in Flagstaff for a number of years, I recently reluctantly moved down tot Prescott when I got engaged. I am no reluctantly engaged, just sad to not be living in Flagstaff anymore. Actually, it was just over one year ago; I’m still in denial, plus I still come up to Flag every week for various things like work and music.
Coinciding with plans to relocation, a friend told me that Tsunami on the Square, Prescott’s annual performing arts and culture festival, was looking for a new executive director. I got the job, so I’ve been up to my eyelashes learning how to run a big festival. Never having been executive director of anything other than my single-parent household for 12 years, the title made me wince; for the first sis months I preferred to think of myself as Executive Footsoldier. With the 10th anniversary festival happening June 14, I have settled in. I have raised enough money for this year, and am breathing easier.
When I interviewed for the position las tMay, I asked the former director if she believed I could plan a wedding (also for the first time) at the same time as directing the festival. “Absolutely!” she said brightly. “Same skill set.” I had heard the dramatic stories from my cousins, how wedding planning could suck all the juice from your life, the way tamarisk invades riverbanks and chokes out the leavy, native cottonwoods. I am pleased to say that planning my wedding has not choked out the joy in my life, but it can be stressful. (Deep breaths involuntarily begin here…)
I never truly wanted to marry any of my past sweethearts, but admit I did daydream once or twice about having all my favorite people, my greatest hits, as I like to call them. in one spot at the same time. Everyone finally meeting everyone else from the various places I’ve lived: California, Massachusetts, Arizona, Ireland. Wonderful. And the music we’d all make! But imagining both sides of the family all together makes me cringe even now. (More deep breaths.) My parents divorced when I was 6; it was rough. Like many brides-to-be, I’ve done a bit of relationship repair, practiced forgiveness whenI feel angry, arrogant or entitled, and I have given more time to meditation and prayer. I am visualizing the day being imperfectly beautiful. I was at a wedding in Scottsdale recently and the birdsong throughout the outdoor ceremony was the most magical part of the whole event.
My mom and stepfather are paying for my wedding. I think back on the years before being engaged when I was the “one-woman-show,” the single mom and college student, always working a few part-time jobs, self-supporting. Receiving the love and support (and large chunks of cash) from my mom and stepdad in the past year has been humbling. The truth is that I wouldn’t be able to afford the elegant wedding I have planned for October without their help. Before being engaged, I had not been in the habit of bi-weekly, hour-long phone conversations with my mom who currently lives in Hong Kong. Her generosity, excitement and pure love have melted some of my “Keep Out” armor. I am seeting her in a new way. My childhood, my history, is changing. Here is a clip of my mother in action, taken from my home movie collection of childhood memories:
Superhere: The La Jolla Beach and Tennis Club, 1977.
A dozen or so children are all squatting around something flat near the high tide mark. The beach there has a long, shallow slope until way out near the sailboats when in drops steeply into an impossibly deep submarine canyon. I set my peanut butter and jelly triangle on a not-sandy stripe on the striped towel and walk with my mother down to the water to see what the children are looking at: a sand shark about four feet long, beached and maybe dying. Its gills are moving, plastic-looking membranes sliced into its silvery skin. My mother, 24 years old and in her madras bikini, steps into the circle and reaches down to grab the shark by its tail above the fin, lifts it up swiftly from the wet sand like a superhero. With two or three fluid steps through the ankle-deep water, she swings her arm overhead and hurls the shark into the waist-high waves. Its tail flicks twice, flip-flops before it disappears. The children’s mouths are still open as she bends and slashes her hands clean in the clear water and then grinning, walks back over to me and takes mine.
Megan Buchanan is a poet, performer and dancemaker. Her poems have appeared in The Sun Magazine, make/shift, The San Pedro River Review, lines+stars, and an anthology called Eating Her Wedding Dress from Ragged Sky Press (Princeton). Born in Newport Beach, California, she currently lives in southern Vermont with her two children and works as a high school humanities teacher with teen mothers. www.meganbuchanan.net