Jane's wedding

I’ve been having weird dreams. Last night’s took the cake.

I was back in my tiny hometown of Auxvasse, Mo. for the wedding of my friend, Jane. We haven’t seen each other for 40 years but stay in touch on Facebook. She was a year ahead of me in school. 

In my dream, Jane was her current age. I was in my twenties.

Snow had fallen the night before but, lucky for Jane, her wedding day dawned bright and sunny.

I saw Jane in her white dress and veil, her sister, and her parents as they were driving to the wedding. The four of them had somehow squeezed into the seat of her father’s pick-up, and were stopped at the town’s one traffic light in front of Dryden’s General Store. (Auxvasse doesn’t have a red/yellow/green traffic light, just a flashing red one above the intersection of what used to be Highway 54 before the state pissed away millions of taxpayer dollars building a four-lane bypass around the town, and the “farm-to-market” blacktop that runs through the countryside to Montgomery City.)

The wedding and reception were to be held at the north edge of town. I rode there with my best friend Craig in his 1966 red GTO. Craig and I spent countless hours in his Goat (his nickname for it) on hot summer nights, driving up and down Highway 54 from one end of town to the other (from the Shell Station to the Dairy Bride drive-in, less than a mile) during our youth, listening to music on the 8-track tape player he had purchased with the proceeds from his job pumping gas at the Sinclair station in Kingdom City, six miles south of town.

The Goat was a great-looking car, every teenage boy’s wet dream, but had a major problem: The right front wheel kept falling off, usually when Craig was driving at high speeds. Once, when we were barreling down Interstate 70 en route home from Columbia, he stopped to pick up a hitchhiker. At 80 mph the wheel detached and flew into a nearby cornfield. Craig didn’t freak at all, he and his passengers were used to it. He knew how to keep the car under control until he could steer it into the breakdown lane onto which the front end would gently fall, causing sparks to fly when the bumper hit the pavement, as he held the steering wheel tight and brought the car to a stop. The hitchhiker, who had begun shrieking the moment the wheel fell off, jumped out and ran away as fast as his legs could carry him while Craig and I went into the cornfield to find the wheel.

We parked outside the Chalet Café, a log cabin torn down decades ago, that served the best cheeseburgers known to man. As we were crossing the road to the wedding, I glanced to my right and saw Bill and Hillary Clinton. He was wearing a tuxedo, she was in a long blue satin gown. Hillary looked happy. She was carrying in her left hand a large box with a silver bow and with the right was holding up the hem of her dress so it wouldn’t get wet from the melting snow. I snuck a peek and it's true. She has cankles.

There’s senior housing on the actual spot to which the Clintons, Craig and I were headed but in my dream we arrived at an enormous Italian-style wedding venue, one of those places familiar to any New Yorker, a multi-story building with ornate Roman statues built into the façade, that can accommodate four or five wedding receptions simultaneously. There were no people of Italian ancestry when I was growing up in Auxvasse. There were no people of any ancestry other than Scotch-Irish, German and African. Heck, there was was only one Catholic family and they pretty much kept to themselves. Why this gaudy Italianate structure had been built in Auxvasse was mystifying.

When we arrived U-2 was playing and the dance floor was packed. Bono announced he had a special guest who wanted to sing. Olivia Newton-John got up on the stage, said she was so happy for her dear friend, and breathlessly sang “I Honestly Love You” as Jane and her groom danced under a spotlight. Olivia looked old.

Wedding cake was served. I love wedding cake, but only if it has real buttercream frosting. The frosting on Jane’s cake was that fluffy stuff that tastes like Cool Whip. Gross. I took one bite, and decided to work out.

Magically, I was outside in my workout clothes, in a large park with swaying palm trees where, under a canopy, there was an elliptical machine. I jumped on that until I started sweating heavily. (I’ve never used an elliptical machine.) It was so hot I removed my shirt and hung it over the railing. I then got off and was doing push-ups (I haven’t done those since I was in my twenties) when I realized someone was standing behind me, waiting to use the facility. It was the actor who plays a murdered cop on Hand of God, an Amazon series my wife and I are watching.

I grabbed my backpack and left. When I got back to my car (Craig and the GTO had disappeared) I realized I had left behind my gray t-shirt with a hole where the label used to be. I’ve had that shirt since the 1980s, it won’t shrink, the fabric is paper thin and the ribbing around the neck is frayed, but I’m as attached to it as a toddler is to his or her bankie. I was trying to decide if I should return to the park for it when I woke up.  

Our 14-year-old dachshund, Bonnie, was licking my face. Her tail was thumping, excited for her day to begin.