Art as a Wedding Priest
I’m Art Kumbalek and man oh manischewitz what a world, ain’a? So listen, it is tradition that I address you’s, my faithful readers, right here, right now, in our month of so-called June known as such since 1582 when Pope Gregory XIII dicked with the alter-kaker Julian calendar and decided to name the sixth month of year after the Roman goddess Juno, and from my toe-tip into the waters of research, she was “the god of marriage and childbirth, and the wife of Jupiter, king of the gods.” Must’ve been some kind of hotsy-totsy to be the sixth-month-of-the-year calendar girl for, lo, these couple, three, eleventeen years, ain’a?
Please be seated.
And so I hear, my sons and daughters, daughters and sons and every which way ’tween, that another Memorial Day weekend has come and gone and now I’m trying to wrap my noggin around the fact that it’s June already with the first day of summer coming up like a bad burrito, we’re now into that time of year where my five most favorite words are “cold front on the way,” I kid you not.
And so I prounounceth: June, that time of year come like a cleaver for young ladies to become new brides; and their boyfriends to become new grooms, whether they like it or not. And so June, as the years pass, does become the month for anniversaries, the remembrance pleasant, or bittersweet, as in this little story:
So this guy goes to the Wizard to ask him if he can remove a curse he has been living with for the past 40 years. The Wizard says, “Perhaps, but you will have to tell me the exact words that you believe were used to put the curse on you.” And without hesitation, the man says, “I now pronounce you man and wife.” Ba-ding!
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But that’s not the kind of thing all you’s newlyweds need to hear. You want to hear something uplifting and hunky-dory. Something along the lines of what the great lexicographer Samuel Johnson said when he heard of a friend getting married for the second time after his first wife croaked, and remarked how he found that admirable ’cause it celebrated the spirit of hope over experience. (18th-century rim shot here, please) Ba-dinglish!
Since none of you’s happy couples have invited me to your matrimonial shindigs, even for the open bar portion, I did a little research to find some wise words of wisdom about the wedded state I could pass on to you through this essay. I checked the Bible and you can just imagine the kind of gas they were passing on the topic, what the fock.
But I say onto you, the Bible’s words sounded trite and contrived and I figured you already heard it all before, anyways. Then I came across a couple things from the ancient Greeks. One, a proverb, “Marriage is the only evil that men pray for,” and the other from some guy named Hipponax out of the 6th century B.C.: “Two days are the best of a man’s wedded life: The days when he marries and buries his wife.” Kind of sexist what-not for this day and age, so I kept researching.
I leapt ahead a couple thousand years to Helen Rowland in 1922’s Guide to Men, “A husband is what is left of a lover, after the nerve been extracted”; Ambrose Bierce wrote in The Devil’s Dictionary, “Bride, n. A woman with a fine prospect of happiness behind her.” Oh boy.
None of the quotes I found had any positive words about marriage, which turns out to be the same silent words I could’ve said on the subject in the first focking place—nothing good. So you’re on your own. Looks like you’ll have to come up with something good to say about marriage yourselves. Don’t worry, you got a whole lifetime to find it but since you’re married, it’ll only seem like two lifetimes. Ba-ding!
And with June comes the Father’s Day, ’natch. And if you’re too focking cheap to spring for a gift for the old fart, how ’bout make a nice homemade card with a quote from no finer writer there ever be again than dear Mr. Yeats from near Dublin, celebrating his 160th birthday on June 13 as best he can:
I have certainly known more men destroyed by the desire to have a wife and child and to keep them in comfort than I have seen destroyed by drink and harlots.
In conclusion: As for me, yes, then, of fathers, of sons, this time of year, I’ll be seeing you, as the song goes, in all the old familiar places, in every lovely summer’s day; I remember you, memories lit, ’cause I’m Art Kumbalek, and I told you so.
