SYLVIA LINDELL S. and JAMES THOMAS S. – Autumn 1969

"My mother and father were married in a small church somewhere in Oklahoma City three months after they met in 1969. It was an autumn wedding. She was twenty-three; he was thirty. Their mutual friends Jan and Terrie Foss introduced them that summer. My mother sends a Christmas card to Terrie Foss every year; she doesn’t hold him or his former wife responsible for introducing her to the man who would co-create the darkest period of her life.

Her memory is generally creative in what it selects for recall, but I’ve no doubt what she says about that day is true. She cried as she walked down the aisle, not because of the jitters, but because she was afraid. She shook with terror. She tells me she knew in the core of her being that she was making a mistake. He changed after that, she says. Like night and day, he changed.

In one of the photos of my mom, she clasps her hands in a girlish gesture of nervousness. You can see this nervous handclasp in the photo of her with my dad, taken a couple years after their marriage. He’s not in any of the wedding photos so I’ve included this one to show what he looked like. My father says, had he paid careful attention and extrapolated certain behaviors present on their wedding day, he might have accurately guessed that my mother and her family harbored seriously negative feelings about and habits toward men.

Between my grandmother and her three sisters, there were fourteen marriages. (The other woman in the photos is my grandmother, Frances June, my namesake.) There was a deranged culture of meanness and jealousy among these sisters, whose lives set the precedent for those of their children’s. The voice of judgment that descended from her female elders told my mother that, being twenty-three and unmarried, she was a failed, worthless woman - an old maid. A man who looked like Al Pacino had proposed to her, but she didn’t like him for some reason and declined his offer. Instead, she chose my dad. She had waited twenty-three years and I guess that was long enough.

My mother uses her experience marrying my father as an example of what not to do in matters of the heart. Wait, she tells me. Wait for as long as it takes to be sure. Pay attention to his small affections - if he won’t hold your hand, don’t marry him.

KATHY S. and JAMES THOMAS S.– Summer 1984

I was six when my father remarried. He became sober the year before he and my mom divorced in 1981, and then disappeared for two years. When he returned, he started dating a woman he met in AA – actually, she was in Al-Anon. They got married at an AA clubhouse called “The Round Table,” located in a strip mall next to a strip club in Oklahoma City.

Seated on the couch in the photo are Jenny, five; me, six; my brother John, eight; and my other brother Jim, ten. I remember feeling very uncomfortable during the event, like I didn’t belong there. I was always a little ill-at-ease in the various AA clubhouses that my father dragged us to. We all were. This one in particular was dingy and wreaked strongly of stale coffee and ground-in cigarette ash. High, curtained windows and fluorescent lights. Broad wood paneling. A million sprung couches. Normally, we were there at night; being there for a wedding in the middle of the day with nice clothes and our hair tended to lent an air of anachronism.

I discovered these photos after my grandfather died in 2001. I was at a [S..] family reunion in New Mexico when a distant cousin gave me a box of stuff collected from my Papa’s trailer. There was a steep, dusty hill that lead up from the lake and I stood there looking through the box. The first photo knocked me clean out of myself. I hadn’t seen Kathy’s face since I was ten. I’d forgotten what she looked like. Forgotten what Jenny looked like. I do remember that I was wearing brand new jelly sandals at the wedding. And I remember thinking how odd it was that when the ceremony was over and everybody stood around eating cake, it felt like just another AA meeting.

Like the first, there is no photographic record of my father at his second wedding.

ROSE S. and JAMES THOMAS S. – Summer 1991

Kathy drained their joint bank account and divorced my dad in the summer of 1988. He’d been at some Olympic ceremonies performance where he and my brothers sat close to the stage and watched as Ray Charles sputtled and whirred in a drunken stupor. When my dad got home that night, his key didn’t work.

He started dating Rose not long after that. They met through AA again – like Kathy, she was Al-Anon. He moved in to her suburban home and lived there for two years before they married. My brothers and I didn’t make much of an effort with Rose, assuming that to be the safest position to take after our first experience with stepmothers. My oldest brother drank all the syrup out of Rose’s maraschino cherries jar one weekend and caused a spur in our relations with her that lasted several visitations.

My brothers were gone at summer camp when my dad and Rose tied the knot at a small Methodist church on Meridian Avenue in Oklahoma City. My mother dropped me off at the curb and I walked sullenly across the long, dead, sloping lawn up to the sanctuary. It was incredibly hot. I wore a bright pink shirt and a plaid skirt and sat next to Ashley, my new step-sister’s husband’s daughter. She was thirteen and I was twelve. By our calculations, I was her step-aunt-once-removed. She thought it was funny to be older than her aunt. She rode horses and had smooth, thick dishwater blond hair cut in a bob with a flower burst for bangs. She listened to Garth Brooks and contemporary country music. I liked her.

There was a reception at Rose’s home after the wedding. She chose enormous, tasteful flower arrangements and people brought food to share. Rose made her trademark German chocolate cake. I called my mother and she came to pick me up. How was it? she asked. I dunno, I shrugged. She was curious, but didn’t say anything more except that she thought it was too bad the boys couldn’t be there. They were happy they didn’t have to go, though. And I was jealous they got out of it.

I don’t have any photos of this last and final wedding ceremony, but I can say that my father’s nuptial habits prove the adage: the third time’s a charm. After sixteen years of marriage, he and Rose are stuck like glue. They like each other, and they laugh easily – two characteristics of a solid relationship, near as I can tell. They have framed photographs from their wedding hanging in two rooms of their house."

-submitted by Jennifer June