Fannie and Corydon crash my wedding
Corydon’s photo flash powder
blasts the room as he asks
How much are you paying
the waiters and cooks?
Fannie wants to know
Are you pregnant yet?
More than a century they’ve been ghosts.
Matter of family history, they birthed
my grandma six months after marriage,
same day President Garfield was assassinated.
Corydon published a newspaper,
Democrat in a Republican town
until the printing plant burned down.
Go figure.
Fannie as a hobby crocheted homilies
for the Presbyterian ladies such as
STOP THE RAILROAD BOSSES.
Grandma as their child endured
schoolyard taunts. Which may explain
why Grandma was an old lady all her life,
always proper. But she comes to our
hippie wedding, her ghost.
Corydon offers a toast:
May your love bear fruit.
May you nourish the poor.
May you poison the rich.
Tell lies, you will be elected.
Tell truth, you will be shot.
May you tell truth regardless.
He leaves a silver dollar
and a note under his plate:
Nothing has changed.
…..
Note: There are ghosts at every wedding, though they wait to show up years later in the photo album of our memory. My own small wedding (it was the sixties) had more ghosts than guests. My wife and I were high school sweethearts. Still together. Our wedding party grows larger all the time.
Photos are of Fannie and Corydon.
First published in Live Encounters. Thank you editor Mark Ulysses.
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