I received a phone call from a number in Seattle on Friday afternoon. Given that I had been officially ‘jobless’ since that past Monday, my normal propensity to ignore any calls from unfamiliar numbers had dissipated- anything could be a potential moneymaking opportunity, or at least an interruption from the day’s monotony. 

“Hello?” I said, not wanting to give to much away- as in, “Hello, you’ve reached writer/bartender/wedding officiant/travel advisor Liz Norment, how might I be of service?”

“Hi, is this Liz, with Have Lover, Will Travel?” a voice, from the other side, said.

“Have Lover, Will Travel” was the wedding officiant/honeymoon travel planner arm of my most recent ventures, and the one I was most excited about building at the present moment, despite the fact that every potential block built within the industry was falling apart. If I was to have the words to unite bride and groom, forever, I presently needed to have just the right words to comfort those brides who were realizing that their dream weddings were indefinitely postponed.

“Hi! Yes, hi, this is Liz,” I said. 

“Hi, my name is Dan. I was wondering if you’re available to officiate a wedding tomorrow,” he told me.

Knowing that the city would be officially under quarantine by Sunday night, or at least some American version of what we’d seen happening in China and Italy, I understood his urgency. “Yes, I’m available,” I told him.

“This would be an elopement?” I inquired.

“Yeah, our wedding has been postponed… so we were hoping just to do something small now while we still can,” he explained.

“I love this idea,” I told him, suddenly filled with more hope than I had been in the past bleak week. “Let me send you an email with my general ceremony ouline and a few questions for you and your partner, and we can go from there,” I told him. “What time are you thinking, for tomorrow?” I asked him.

“I don’t know, how about 2:30?” he asked.

“That sounds great,” knowing that really, I would make any time work.

I sent him and his partner an email with my ceremony outline and also the specific questions I liked to ask couples to help recite their love story, create the personalization of their vows, and offer suggested readings. This exchange usually took at least 3 weeks, allowing an in-person meeting with the couple so I could come to understand how best to deliver what would become their union, forever, unto those who they deemed most loved ones.

I would have less than 24 hours, no formal meeting, and was told that their most ‘loved ones’ would be present via FaceTime… I imagined myself as the nightly talk-show hosts who somehow necessarily gleaned energy from a now crowd-less audience. Would my lines hit with the same impact, given the very apparent lack of a grandmother’s trembling hands, a bridesmaid’s audible sob, a father’s hesitant tear?

While I worked to adjust the set of questions and preferences I sent to couples, altered given the current, urgent, and fragile landscape, I received another phone call from Dan, who I now understood lived in Brooklyn, via Seattle. “Hey. Sorry. Are you still interested in making this happen? We just don’t want to miss our chance to get an appointment at the courthouse…” he told me. 

“I’m just finishing up the email. I’ll send it to you in a few minutes and we’ll go from there,” I told him. “Trust me, there’s nothing I want more than to make this happen tomorrow.”

After I received each partner’s responses around 9pm, I went to work writing what I hoped would be a ceremony that would bring hope amid despair, and closeness amid apparent distance. 

Given my emailed proposal, the couple let me know that they preferred not to read or approve of the ceremony I would create. This was an ideal approach so that we could experience the most natural reactions from those physically, or virtually, present. This made my interpretation of their every typed word all the more prescient.

 I first met Dan and his fiancee Sam after at the edge of the park, as I, along with my boyfriend, exited a cab. He had been recruited as the on-site photographer, videographer, and the one who would help keep me calm. At this point, he knew nearly every word of their ceremony, after at least 30 ‘rehearsals’ in our apartment the night before.

Sam and Dan were bright-eyed and young and contained all the hope I myself needed at the moment. I wanted to hug them both, of course, but couldn’t. We walked over to what had been designated as “the altar” of sorts and went over a few basic questions before their two designated witnesses arrived. 

“You must be James,” I said, to a curly-haired bow-tied man. 

“Hey! Yes! Hi!” he said, before measuring his relative distance to me, to Sam, to Dan. As Sam bent down to try to change into her bridal shoes, a young girl in a pink fur coat came walking up, waving excitedly. 

Oh my god, I’m already crying,” she said. 

“Olivia?” I asked the other witness. 

“Yes, hi!” she confirmed. 

And that was all of us, physically.

We briefly went over when the witnesses’ readings would take place, while we used all the iPhones present to connect with 36 family members and friends from all over the country. There was a father doing dialysis in Ohio. A sister in Boston- “I just put my dress on over my pajamas!” she told the group. A mother and son who looked exactly alike, with their faces squeezed together within the 3×5″ screen. 

When we were ready to start, the two witnesses and my boyfriend all stood 6 feet from each other, and a safe enough distance from the couple so that the family could still hear their ceremony over the early March wind.

I began. 

We were brought here today even knowing, that perhaps, we shouldn’t be here. The entire city has been shut down in an unprecedented mandate to avoid the very prevalent invasion of an unfamiliar virus. Yet we were brought here, despite this warning, in the name of a very coveted, yet familiar, feeling- we were brought here for love.

I looked out, beyond the couple, at the cherry blossoms just bursting to life, for what would be a temporary moment of perhaps unnoticed beauty. The Spring would go on, it seemed, without our bearing witness to it.

Standing here now, even amidst temporary chaos, we are confident that this moment will undoubtedly withstand the test of time.

As a small crowd gathered beyond the fence that surrounded the six of us, standing there below the towering oak trees, the inability to contain, repress, or quarantine certain feelings was palpable.

I mentioned a quote that the groom he had emailed me the day before. ‘

Dan has said, “Once we met, I just knew that I had found something so unexpected and special. There was never a thought that anything could be better than this.”

The air between them seemed to stand still as it was so apparent that they couldn’t wait to embrace each other.

Irrepressible. It’s what brought these two together, a feeling that they could neither deny nor contain, and what brings us here now, despite all odds, and current circumstances. Some things are too strong to hold back, or to wait for what can be thought of as a sensible amount of time. It’s simply, and quite knowingly, irrepressible.

Their witnesses were called individually to ‘walk up’ and stand, while still maintaining a 6-foot distance from the couple. There were tears and laughs and more than a few admittances of “this is just so you guys…” all meant to solidify the bond that these two would share forever, upon the rooted, gnarly soil and uncertain earth of a park in transition. Winter to Spring, social gathering area to legally enforced distance, tranquil greenspace to quarantined chaos. There, with a few words, two would be transformed from engaged, to married.

And now, feeling this foundation beneath us, within us, and the future of these two before you, I ask you, present loved ones and those with whom we are virtually connected, to join hands with the person beside you. Dan and Sam, look out and feel all of the love that surrounds you now, this moment, within the historic landscape that we find ourselves. I now ask all of you, do you give your support for this union?”

I heard enough clapping, cheers, tears, and muffled affirmations to confidently proceed. 

They exchanged rings. They exchanged vows. They solidified their love in a bond, forever, amid two witnesses, through the authority of one stranger, with the virtual blessing of 36 faces trying to transcend the miles of separation, before a haphazard congregation that had been stopped in their tracks, less than 24 hours before the city would be ordered to stop completely.

Dan and Sam, having been present here to witness your vows of marriage with all who are assembled here in support of you, and by the authority vested in me, it is with great joy that I can now pronounce you husband and wife. Dan, you may kiss your bride.

As the words hung in the air, the world seemingly stopped. The moment felt untouchable, irrepressible, eternal.

The two newlyweds waved to the assembled crowd, all who had appeared to cheer for and congratulate them, these two strangers who were now one. Most of the faces on the other sides of the collected phones were wet with tears.

Champagne was popped. The marriage license was signed. Elbows were tapped. We said goodbye and then went on with our lives for the next day until we were told that we no longer could go on. And now, we wait.

There is a tipping point. There is an extremely rare circumstance in which a guest is so out of touch, so deliberately rejecting the norms of dining socially and the respect of the service behind it that instead of getting angry and masking your bitter reaction behind a saccharine sweet smile, you embrace them for reasons even unbeknownst to you.

This is the Wasco’s. A couple that is so deliberately ignorant to the proper way to behave inside of an establishment that it’s actually endearing. And captivating. And I somehow have the beleaguered opportunity to serve and observe them nearly every week now, and I equallly wish I did and did not have this honor. 

They arrive around 6pm. “In time for the music,” he tells you with a grin. 
The music, of course, starts at 8:30. 

“We like to dance,” she says with a wink. You know this of course. You know them.

“Sounds lovely,” you say, and you mean it, somehow. You do.

They sidle up to the bar, inevitably at the most prominent and desirable seats around your pristine and rather seductive round marble structure. They mark this coveted territory first with their preferred dining companions – a thick stack of noticeably rumpled New York Times sections, a bright book of crosswords, a romance novel that you have an ominous feeling is part of some omnibus of which the 8 that preceded it and the limitless number that will follow it all were waiting at home; all with the same plot lines and characters; all with no twists or turns, just the shudder of a seductive curve being traced by a hesitant finger; all that she would find herself lost in again and again. 

Sometimes, on special nights that you either presume or hope are as such, they also bring Scrabble. The travel version, the one made with the rigid plastic grid usually reserved for bumpy car rides or for swaying train cars along foreign high-speed railways, but in this case, these speed-resistant grids only slow them down as they tentatively place tile after tile in its painstakingly designated container. 

They get settled for what seems like an hour and then look to you confusedly as you try to hand them menus. “No, no, we like to eat late.”

Very late. You know this.

“Ok, would you like to have a drink at the bar while you wait for a table?” You ask, recognizing that you sound a bit too eager. Because not waiting for a table means they’ll be there with you for the next 5 hours, before which they’ll plan their next move. Which, of course, I’ll get to later. 

After thumbing unnecessarily through the few pages of your drink list, he gently gestures for her to put it down before giving you the same familiar response. “We’ll start with a bottle of Pinot Grigio,” winking at you, as if it’s a special varietal reserved for just them. That same varietal you’ve reserved just for them, every weekend every Saturday, always reluctantly. And then nearly before you respond, they are shuffling through the evening’s chosen paper materials and coughing or clearing their throats, peering over their thick glasses and trading papers and grunting or coughing then trading back. 

Once they finish this odd elderly mating ritual from the human species of Long Island, you say, “May I?” as you try to find a paperless landing place for the stemmed wine glasses as they peer back at you over their sordid papers. 

Shuffle, shuffle. You read his hand cues for where to place the glasses. You’re learning, as she has, as they have.

“Would you like to taste the wine, ma’am?” She seems both bashful and complacent. She points to his glass. He taps it twice. You pour a sip. You’re learning. 

“It’s nice,” he says with an air of dignified victory.

As she eagerly takes another sip, you admire the fact that once again, she’s chosen to wear nearly every piece of statement jewelry in her arsenal. And you are confident this wasn’t from indecision, this is simply her statement. Every statement. All of the statements.

“I love your jewelry tonight,” you hear yourself say, and mean it. You mean it, somehow. It’s refreshing to be in the presence of someone so boldly disobeying every rule of accessorization in North Brooklyn these days.

She beams. “Oh! Thank you.” You can tell she means it. She likes you, and this has taken a while.

After the Scrabble grid is unzipped, they position their travel-sized letter sleds and thick, worn Scrabble-official dictionary so as to cover at least 5 spots in your 10-seat bar. On a Saturday night.

As they select their letters and get down to business, you realize that all these years of marriage neither yielded a particularly confident vocabuary nor competitive sense of trust as part of every turn requires a smug shuffle through the tattered pages of said word dictionary. 

“Are you sure that’s a word?”

“Bob,” she says, slightly exasperated and with a significant eyebrow raise as she lowers her very strategic move into its chosen receptacles that will somehow propel her into first place and just noticeably a bit out of her barstool.

When the music starts, Scrabble becomes the second priority of the night. Instead of listlessly looking over her letters, she’s watching his eyes and waiting for the slightest signal that it’s time. Which, I imagine he defines loosely based on the rhythm, the beat, the song, and perhaps of some memory of them on a cruise ship once in the late ’80s. And when he gives the sign, one that even the shrewdest poker player could never identify, her eyes, always at half-mast and caked in a shoe polish-esque interpretation of eyeshadow, meet his, and without another word or a slight nod or a missing of a beat, they are entranced in the kind of waltz that is learned after what I imagine must be 52 years of moving together. 

The music stops at 10:30 and Scrabble aways wraps up around 10:45, somehow. At this point you drain the bottle of Pinot Grigio but only once you have her attention, waiting with the inverted bottle just above her glass so she knows it’s empty. If not, she’ll ask you to take it back out of the recycling bin. “I think there’s a little left…”

And this is the part where they begin to separately scroll through a digital rolodex of local restaurants that are supposedly welcoming to people who “eat very late!”, and go through one by one and call. “Hello!! This is Sue Wasco! What’s the latest we can come for dinner!” after a pause. “What! Oh. Ok!”

He recites the phone number of their next victim. 

“Hello!! This is Sue Wasco! What’s the latest we can come for dinner!” a pause. “Ok! You aren’t going to rush us, are you? We eat very slowly and we don’t like to be rushed.”

At this point I have no idea why anyone on the other end of the line would say yes, come on in. Because once every few months, they get rejected by every restaurant in their rolodex, and they reluctantly ask me for a food menu about 3 minutes before the kitchen closes. “We would have eaten here anyway but your wine is too expensive,” she tells you. 

“We have a bottle in the car,” Bob explains. You aren’t really sure how this fits into the narrative or how after 2 bottles of wine and more in the car and a thick eyeshadow regimen that visibly inhibits visibility, they’re able to drive back to Wherever, Long Island.

“We usually go to Oregano, but they’re closing early tonight.” Yep. I bet they just happen to be closing early and likely armed with a new failproof caller ID system on their restaurant phone. 

And Oregano closing early means they take their food menus to the first of all 3 recently emptied booths, previously occupied by the rest of non-Spanish society who like to eat dinner before 11pm. 

If they stay, they’ll order a red. They’ll order 3 courses that they wish to be coursed out. They will not share. They will not speak.  He will, unknowingly, slump the newspaper too far into the candle before tamping it out with an air of what could be nonchalance or a very disciplined control of his own shame, it’s hard to tell. They will not notice that no other patrons have been in sharing the space with them for nearly 2 hours. They will not care that the lights are all the way up and the music is off. They will let the food get cold. They will refuse every offering of, “Can we box up the rest for you?” 

“I’m still eating,” she’ll explain, again and again. 

“She likes to eat slow,” He’ll say over his newspaper. 

They will fall asleep at the booth. You will have to wake them, and tell them that the food has been boxed up, and that yes, the wine has been finished for a while now. You will watch the fairly deceptive dream of them dissipate into a cloud of frustration and evaporated Montepulciano and swear you won’t be so sweet next time they come in. 

But this of course only happens every once in a while, the late-night dinner dance. And that is why you can still say with conviction, “I love your jewelry tonight Sue.” or “Bob, tell me again how you two learned to dance so well?” because thankfully, the wine you purvey is slightly more expensive than that at Oregano. 

Usually, you are left to watch them leave, Sue with her black-caked eyes at half mast, waiting for Bob to bring the car and her to Oregano.

You wonder about the you at the other end of the deal; the girl who works at Oregano who doesn’t get the evening portion of the Wascos, the oddly charming and barely tolerable pre-dinner antics. She has to suffer through the dinnertime Wascos, every time. 

You wonder, sometimes, if she’s ok, as you bike past the unassuming little Italian restaurant on Berry Street. You imagine stopping in and striking up a conversation about the Wasco’s, letting her vent a little. And as you’re tempted to stop, one day you swear you’ll stop, it will only be to tell them their wine prices are far too high for the neighborhood. 

Neither here nor there

within a city and sky

she was, limitless.

Draped in black leather 

she loved the added mischief

that came with this weather.

I am writing to you for the first time without a very important part of my office and my creative experience. My cat had to be put down two weeks ago. My cat Bear, who has been here for every post, every email, every photo shoot that he interrupted, every single moment.

Cats are such a beautifully important and personal part of a writer’s life. I called him my furry paperweight because sometimes he would sit up here right next to my keyboard, knowing and not caring that a desk is not a place for cats. He would lay right at my feet and wait patiently as I typed for hours. He would pass through the room and meow, letting me know he was going to eat now. He lifted me up when I felt frustrated or worthless or scared. My days were never lonely, my apartment was always warm.

As I hugged him for the last time at the emergency vet clinic, I whispered into his ear, “You were never too wild for me Bear.” He was a street cat from Queens and he was tough and frisky and to win his affection wasn’t easy but once you did, he was yours forever.

It feels so empty to have this little being that you shared so much with just be gone. And it makes me think too that as I’m sitting here writing to you, with a broken heart and an empty house, I hope that you aren’t in pain. I hope that your heart isn’t hurting. I hope that you aren’t grieving or crying. But I also hope that when your heart does break, that you’ll be strong enough to get through it. And that you hug your loved ones extra tight tonight.

XO

Liz

South-bound north-kept heart

Past winter-long shadows cast

Coming, going, still.

We know you are here

no matter how soft you walk

small cat.

I wrote this haiku when I was reading a lot of Jack Kerouac’s haiku and subscribing to his poetic license

and also when I had a cat.

My cat Bear had to be put down yesterday and although it may seem trivial, to have a cat in the city is to share a piece of hope and wildness and wonder and love just within a tiny apartment just a few floors up in any building on any block within whatever neighborhood in this town.

He was mine. He was that little piece of hope I needed 7 years ago when this city first broke me, and he carried me through so many of those moments that would come.

It was Bear and me against the world. He made things seem ok when they weren’t. He was the only constant I’ve had here in the city where nothing ever stays the same.

This haiku is for you Bear, in so many words and with so many thoughts. #bearwithme

Just as Summer leaves

There’s beauty in the breakdown

When we finally Fall.

It was sacred, she knew,

sips of coffee, thoughts of you

in the blackest hues.

Recognize the dangers of “false” Instagram-only companies.

Determine if this “business” is trend-driven and product-focused or concentrated on building a brand.

Be hyper-aware of too-good-to-be-true promotions.

Too much focus on “shipping time”

If you’ve been victimized

To protect yourself in the future, PAY WITH PAYPAL.

Let’s be honest