I Do, I Do, I Do

I Do, I Do, I Do (Ch. 16)

2010-10-29T11:56:00.000-07:00

The story of four daughters, three couples,

two parents and one very big wedding

LINKS TO WEDDING PHOTOS:

http://www.greenbaypressgazette.com/apps/pbcs.dll/gallery?Dato=20101009&Kategori=GPG04&Lopenr=10090820&Ref=PH

http://picasaweb.google.com/mike.haaf/NickKatieSWedding#slideshow/5526918623781237602

By Thomas Kunkel

CHAPTER 16: THE WEEK THAT WAS

Click here for previous chapters: Ch.15 Ch.14 Ch.13 Ch.12 Ch.11 Ch.10
Ch.9 Ch.8 Ch.7 Ch.6 Ch. 5 Ch. 4 Ch. 3 Ch. 2 Ch. 1

October 18, 2010

One weekend the house is Grand Central, with brides and bridesmaids and flower girls and photographers and aunts and uncles and grannies and friends bustling hither and yon. The next weekend it’s just me, with only our rat-dog of a family pet, Sammy, for company.

Sigh. A dad’s life.

One by one they have all peeled away, the kids ready to start leading their new lives.

At 3:30 a.m. on the Monday after the wedding, Deb and I crawled out of bed and loaded Nick and Katie into our Highlander for the four-hour round-trip drive to the Milwaukee airport, much of it in dreadfully thick fog, to get them on a plane to start their honeymoon. They were spending the week at a beach getaway in Jamaica.

Not long after we got back, Sam and Claire drove off to a rustic resort in western Wisconsin, where they were looking forward to a lot of hiking, kayaking, and just chilling out.

Not long after that, we grabbed a bite of lunch with Gracie and then dropped her off at the Green Bay airport for her return flight to Maryland.

And not long after that, Mike headed to the airport, too, to return to San Diego and his flight training. He’d managed just enough leave time to come in a few days ahead of the wedding and actually get married. But he and his bride will have to wait a few months before they can get to Hawaii for their honeymoon.

That left Helen, at least temporarily. With Deb’s much-practiced help, she spent a day or two packing up her worldly goods into about thirty boxes. That Wednesday morning a moving van came by and picked them up.

Then early Thursday, she and Deb climbed into our Camry and pointed it west by southwest. I enjoyed telling people that Helen was honeymooning with her mother. They made a multi-day road trip to San Diego, by way of Las Vegas (I guess Helen didn’t get the memo that you’re supposed to do Vegas before you get married). Deb flies back in a day or two, and Helen is reunited with Mike—and freshly in possession of Deb’s car, part of our wedding “settlement” with her. (Deb, meantime, will get a new car out of this deal, which, unsurprisingly, she negotiated before telling me about it.)

So I am left here with this feckless dog, whom I can plainly see is no happier about the situation than I am.

It’s the culmination of a week that started fast, then went into a full-bore sprint until we finally crossed the finish line, exhausted, yes, but entirely exhilarated.

Claire and Sam had been the first to arrive, driving in a full week before the wedding—just in time to see a major spread on the wedding in our local paper, the Green Bay Press-Gazette, in which Claire did a nice job explaining what seems so inexplicable to so many.

“What started as a joke between three sisters turned into a common-sense epiphany that seemed far more intriguing than improbable,” the article said. “After all, the Kunkel sisters had been known to share everything from clothes to jewelry to Barbie dolls growing up, so why not a wedding?

“ ‘Oh, my gosh, we share everything,’ said Claire, a high school teacher in Maryland. ‘Clothes. Friends. Katie and I had the same confirmations. We were always celebrating our graduations or birthdays at the same time. We all went to the University of Maryland. Sharing everything is pretty normal for us.’ ”

Their presence was a tangible reminder that it was really and truly happening, and of course Claire was a huge help to Deb and Helen as together they tended to the final, final details. But it was just a lot of fun having them around. One evening we got a bite of dinner and took in a movie, The Social Network (expect some Oscar nominations for this one), and the next morning Sam and I slipped out to play a brisk round of golf.

Then on Wednesday the kids all converged on New York, albeit from different embarkation points—Sam, Claire and Helen from Green Bay; Nick, Katie and Grace from Maryland; and Mike from California. They were there to appear on the next morning’s broadcast of CBS’ Early Show. If they were a little nervous about appearing before millions of people on live television, they were mostly thrilled to get a brief but all-expenses-paid mini-vacation in New York, which both the girls and guys have always loved. And frankly, it proved a welcome diversion for the anxiety that inevitably would have been accumulating had they stayed back in De Pere.

The show’s producers put them up in a nice hotel not far from its Fifth Avenue studios near Central Park, and after spending the afternoon prowling the city the kids were treated to a great (read, expensive) dinner at a midtown steakhouse.

The next morning a car picked them up at 7 a.m. sharp at their hotel for the short ride over to the studio, where they all got some attention in the makeup chair and then waited around the set until it was time for their interview. Back here, meanwhile, Deb and I met Sam’s mother, Maria, at the Kress Inn to watch the show in the hotel’s hospitality suite. At the top of the 8 a.m. hour the camera showed the three couples as the hosts “teased” the upcoming segment—the girls up front, their guys in the back. They all looked great—and happy! Host Harry Smith remarked on what attractive couples they all are. Damn right, Harry!

Alas, there was no Grace. In trying to set up the tableau, the producers came to the understandable conclusion that she would be a “seventh wheel” for the purposes of the visual symmetry. So she was relegated to the sidelines. (She later admitted to feeling a little deflated at that—not because she was dying to be on television but because she had worked so hard, at the show’s urging, to be able to speak to what the wedding meant to the rest of the family.)

About quarter after the hour, their segment began with a delightful two-minute filmed set-up that introduced the couples and quickly recounted how they’d had gotten together in the first place, and eventually engaged within days of one another. The segment used quite a few of the “flip-cam” videos that the girls had recorded themselves, at the producers’ behest, to tell their stories. One fun shot in particular showed the four girls on a sofa, engaging in a staged group hug. If the scene was tongue-in-cheek, the affection was palpable. These were close sisters!

Then it went back to the studio, where Early Show co-host Maggie Rodriguez began interviewing the crew. I’d wondered how she would be able to get all of them involved with only a five-minute window to work with, but she did a very deft job of it.

She began by asking Katie if she still thought the triple wedding was a good idea. “Absolutely!” Katie said unhesitatingly. “Because I didn’t have to do any of the planning!” That led to discussion with Helen about what had gone into the planning and something of the complex logistics of the ceremony. Maggie segued into how each of the couples had found one another, then directly asked Nick if he was okay sharing the big day. His response was lovely. “I was mostly concerned about what she wanted, and making sure that this was going to be her day,” he said. “The Kunkel family, it’s easy to see they really are that close, and they want to share that.”

Maggie teased Sam a bit about whether he was nervous. Ever honest, Sam haltingly admitted to having some nerves, yes, who wouldn’t…and with that, Maggie unexpectedly burrowed in. “What are you worried about?” she said. (I sat there thinking, “That’s easy—have you met Claire?”) But Sam—eminently more polite than I am, and too smart to want to doom his marriage before it began, right there on national television—just hemmed and hawed a bit more. But at that point Claire cleverly interjected that he was just worried about getting his bowtie on straight. Relieved laughter all around.

Maggie closed with a final question that I found especially moving. “Is Dad paying for all this?” Yes, they answered in unison, perhaps a little too gleefully.

“Poor Tom! Poor Tom Kunkel!” Maggie exclaimed.

As Deb and Maria looked my way, I blurted out, “Precisely! Thank you!”

From there the couples headed straight for LaGuardia, and they were back in Green Bay by mid-afternoon. By then, both Mike’s and Nick’s families had arrived, and everyone converged on our house for a casual family dinner. That was followed by our first—and only—full-scale run-through of the father-daughter waltz, which we did under instructor Janet Gollnick’s close scrutiny, down in the cafeteria in the same space where we would do it at the reception two days later. Everyone had been doing their choreographic homework, and I began to think we might just pull it off after all. It was also an indulgence, I must say, to literally get some face time with each of the girls, even if it was spent spinning around a terrazzo floor. They were being tugged in so many directions all week, but for at least a few minutes I had their undivided attention. As we waltzed, a couple dozen of the various family members, including my mom and dad, came along to watch and make it a bit of a party.

It was a lovely way to end a lovely day.

Friday morning, my wife was back in Big Deb mode, with just one goal in mind—get those marriage licenses for Katie and Nick and Mike and Helen, and get them the minute the Brown County clerk’s office opened at 8 a.m. Our home county has an ordinance that requires couples marrying here to obtain their marriage license within thirty days of the wedding. Not much of a problem for people who live here. But for the rare couple commuting here to wed, it’s just one more challenge—and one complicated by the fact that the county insists you bring along an unusually lengthy list of original documents to prove you are you.

Claire and Sam had secured their license earlier in the week, and Deb had worked diligently with the other couples to make sure they a.) had the necessary papers, and b.) remembered to bring them to Wisconsin. Fortunately, they a.) did, and b.) did. Another potential disaster averted. Big Deb allowed herself to exhale. They were in and out of the office in twenty minutes, and there was no stopping this train now.

Their fates thus sealed, the guys then headed out with me to Oneida Country Club, where sixteen of us—grooms, groomsmen, uncles, cousins and friends—gathered for a celebratory round of golf on an absolutely spectacular early-fall day. Oneida is a verdant, old-school course, lovely at any time of the year. But on this day, the sugar maples lining Duck Creek, which bisects the course and touches a good half-dozen of its holes, were stunning shades of gold, orange and red against the blue sky. Even that nasty snap hook on No. 12 couldn’t upset you.

We finished in time to clean up and get back to the Campus Center at St. Norbert for the “rehearsal dinner”—in fact, an open house/reception/buffet for the hundreds of family and friends by now pouring into De Pere. The building fronts the Fox River on the campus’ eastern edge, and the wonderful weather extended into the early evening, beckoning many outside. The grooms’ parents had conceived the idea of a soup-and-sandwich open house in place of the traditional rehearsal dinner because, with so many families involved and so many people traveling for the wedding, it seemed a pragmatic alternative. And it proved to be. It was like a huge extended-family reunion—which, in a sense, it was. Or maybe more accurately, it was a huge, extended-family “pre-union.”

It was also one more example, of many, of the unfailing graciousness and incredible consideration that Maria, Chuck and Marcia (Nick’s parents) and Will and Julie (Mike’s) brought to the entire affair. We will never be able to thank them enough for that gift.

This rehearsal dinner also departed from tradition in that it occurred ahead of the rehearsal, not after it. At 6:30, we herded over to Old St. Joe’s Church everyone who had an actual role in the wedding—and I use “herded” advisedly, for with a triple wedding that was a fair percentage of the crowd.

As is usually the case at wedding rehearsals, the socializing and high spirits tend to predominate, with most folks paying scant attention to instructions. Our three presiders and the wedding coordinator were doing their best to impose some order on the proceedings. But as fifty or more brides, grooms, moms, dads, ushers and flower girls packed the gathering space outside the sanctuary proper, ostensibly to start a run-through of the ceremony, it was barely controlled chaos. I mean, it was fun chaos, but chaos nonetheless.

It all made me a bit anxious. I made myself smile—even as I told myself, well, tomorrow this has the potential to be a logistical catastrophe ….

I needn’t have worried. From the breaking of a beautiful dawn over the Fox River to my girls’ surprise “reveal” of their wedding gowns, all signs pointed to this being a perfect day, and that’s how it turned out.

Between Deb, Helen, Fr. Sal and my St. Norbert colleague Amy Sorenson, everything had been planned as if by script. No, make that by actual script. Think I’m kidding? Here’s a small excerpt from the “Saturday” entry that Amy had prepared and distributed to all involved:

11:30 a.m.: Fr. Jay brings grooms to Presidential Suite, Kress Inn, and gets lunch out of refrigerator

11:30 a.m.: Lunch delivered to home and Kress Inn

11:30 a.m.: Flowers delivered to Kress Inn (for parents, groomsmen, ushers and grandparents)

11:45 a.m.: Flowers delivered to Kunkel home

12 noon: Pat Dart arrives at Kress Inn to help grooms and groomsmen with ties, etc.

12 noon: Ladder up in church, remove and store in Boyle Hall when [photographer] Jerry Turba is set in balcony

12:15 p.m.: Memorial bouquet and other ceremony flowers to church

12:30 p.m.: Flower girls arrive at Kunkel home

1 p.m.: Parking signs are placed in JMS lot and behind heating plant

1 p.m.: Nicole begins flower set-up at Union

1 p.m.: Brides, bridesmaids, flower girls, Kunkel family photos at home

1 p.m.: Programs brought to church (Amy/Jamie)

And so on…single spaced…for several pages.

And you know what? That’s exactly how the day unfolded, pretty much down to the minute. It was amazing to watch—which is essentially what I did, per the plan. I didn’t see much of the guys, who Fr. Jay had over at the Abbey and was shepherding to their appointed rounds. I did help a bit with the girls’ morning shuttles to hair and makeup, but for the most part I watched cars of young women going and coming—fairly frowsy and rumpled in the going, stunningly beautiful in the coming back. It was a veritable Makeover Merry-Go-Round.

Indeed, the more I stared at Amy’s script, the very specificity of it—almost daring any little unwanted detail to just try to elbow its way into the agenda—was as reassuring as the church scrum the night before had been, well, not.

Beyond following their script, I should also add that everyone was happy. Giddily, kid-like, let’s-have-a-party happy. And that sheer happiness just seemed to explode whatever nerves we might have had otherwise.

At 2:35, right on Amy’s cue, the bridesmaids left the house and headed for the church. Ten minutes later, beautiful brides Katie, Claire and Helen walked out our front door toward their waiting car. As Deb and I and Helen stood on the porch seeing them off, Jerry Turba snapped a poignant photo to catch that unique family moment. In every sense, it was time.

The rest of the day played out like a sun-drenched, tulle-draped reverie—and truth be told, not altogether different from the far-fetched dream I’d had years before about that multiple wedding in the University of Maryland chapel. And as it turned out, I wasn’t the only one who likened the day to a dream. Since the wedding, it’s been amazing how many attendees have gone to the trouble of writing us to thank us and say how moved they too were by such a memorable and joyful occasion. Given that the day’s inherent theme was sharing, that response has been especially gratifying to us all.

But maybe the most remarkable note of all came from a couple in Illinois that we’ve never met—Gilbert and Arlisle Beers. This is what the letter said, in its entirety:

“Dear Mr. Kunkel:

“Imagine our surprise when we discovered the triple wedding of your daughters. We were married sixty years ago in a triple wedding in Sheboygan, Wisconsin. Yes, we were also three sisters, and all six of us are all still healthy and happily married. We had never heard of another triple wedding before or since, until we saw the lovely picture in the Green Bay Press-Gazette.

“Please add our congratulations to you and your family at this time of joy.”

Three sisters, three couples, three still-thriving sixty-year marriages! I of course sent it to the kids, as it is without question one of the most hopeful testaments I’ve ever seen.

Thomas Kunkel is president of St. Norbert College in De Pere, Wisconsin.

I Do, I Do, I Do (Ch. 15)

2010-10-10T18:01:00.000-07:00

The story of four daughters, three couples,

two parents and one very big wedding

By Thomas Kunkel

CHAPTER 15: WEDDING BELLS

Click here for previous chapters: Ch.14 Ch.13 Ch.12 Ch.11 Ch.10
Ch.9 Ch.8 Ch.7 Ch.6 Ch. 5 Ch. 4 Ch. 3 Ch. 2 Ch. 1

October 10, 2010

The simplest way to say it, I think, is this: It was a day of love—pure, joyful, unashamed, unvarnished love. As St. Paul said in his first letter to the Corinthians, one of the ceremony’s readings, “Love bears all things, believes in all things, hopes all things, endures all things.”

As I write this, we are all exhausted physically but still quite exhilarated emotionally. The adrenalin carried us effortlessly aloft all through the day and the wedding itself, through the eternity of picture-taking, the pre-reception reception, the dinner, and into an effervescent evening that didn’t finish until nearly midnight. That adrenalin is now long gone, and at the moment my middle-aged legs feel like two columns of concrete. But I can scarcely stop smiling, so perfect was the Big Day, perfect in just about every conceivable way it could be.

I am up early, as is my wont, and in a little while I will start pulling together a casual brunch at the house for the newlyweds, their parents, some of their bridesmaids and groomsmen, and any immediate family who aren’t heading home straight away. We’re expecting a couple dozen folks, so there’s quite a bit to prepare. But I wanted to take a few minutes to set down some quick impressions from what was the most joyful day in Deb’s and my married life, or I should say the most joyful since the birth of all these girls so long ago.

The wedding day began around six a.m. No alarms were set, but the girls and I all arose about the same time after a somewhat fitful and abbreviated night of sleep. I heard the brides-to-be giggling in the kitchen for a while before they called up for Deb and me. They bid us to come down to the basement. When we did, the girls opened a door to a storage room—and there, hanging from the exposed joists overhead, were three beautiful wedding gowns.

It had been nearly a year since they’d picked out those gowns, and nearly a year of me wondering what they might look like. Now they were presented right in front of me, as wonderful and unexpected a gift as I could have asked for.

There was, however, a bit of price to be extracted for this special preview. “So Dad,” Claire said, “guess which dress belongs to which daughter?”

Gulp. I looked harder at the details. All were ivory-colored gowns, strapless and with “sweetheart” necklines and elegant trains. Dress A was made of silk and satin, with a beaded bodice, and it was punctuated with a gracefully long bow down the front. Dress B was made of chiffon and had a bodice of beautiful ruching. Dress C was made of taffeta, and its signature was a dazzling diamondlike pendant. I loved them all. And I hadn’t the foggiest idea which belonged to whom.

I guessed—and got all three wrong, to much laughter. I guessed again, and got them all wrong again, to more laughter, tinged with a little disbelief. I guessed a third time, and I still got two of them wrong, which I think is statistically not possible if the guesser is actually keeping track of his guesses. But frankly, I was still in such a state of shock being in the actual presence of these gowns of legend that my brain wasn’t working too well yet. (The correct answers: Helen’s was Dress A; Claire’s was Dress B; Katie’s was Dress C.)

After this happy start, the day’s business began in earnest. There were so many details that the bridal team had prepared a two-page, single-spaced schedule of activities.

But in truth, little of it had to do with me. As Deb and the girls and their bridesmaids were getting their hair and makeup done up in a kind of stylists’ assembly line, I tried to occupy myself back at home. I swept the fallen autumn leaves from the front porch and driveway, and then from the back patio, in case they were needed for photo settings later. I tried to straight up the house, which as the week went on was gradually taking on the look of a trailer park after the tornado came through. I sat the two dogs in residence—ours as well as Claire’s yellow Lab, Chase. I went over the toast I would give later that night.

How glamorous was my pre-wedding day? Well, about two minutes after I put on my tuxedo, Deb called. Grace answered but I also picked up—in time to hear Deb say, “Has anyone been out back to clean up whatever doggie doo is in the backyard?” Grace, already in her lovely navy-blue maid of honor gown, began to protest. But I cut her short. “I’m on it,” I said.

And moments later there I was, the tuxedoed president of a prestigious liberal arts college, shovel in hand and policing my grounds, doubtless the best-dressed pooper-scooper in wedding history.

About this time the rest of the bridesmaids were arriving at the house, and then the three flower girls—our too-adorable-for-words great-nieces Amelia, Hope and Abigail—and finally the brides themselves.

The scene was a surreal little dichotomy—from the shoulders down they were in loose-fitting shorts and T-shirts, but from the shoulders up they were made up like models, as beautiful as I had ever seen them, with their bridal veils already fixed into their hair.

As they saw them disappear down the basement stairs, I thought for a moment, well, they’re still my girls. Just half an hour later, however, they re-emerged, one by one, as princesses.

It’s an astonishing thing when a father sees a daughter at that moment, so impossibly beautiful in a way he has never seen her and could scarce imagine her, and knowing that within mere hours he officially is not the most important man in her life anymore. The ache that hits you, you can’t quite anticipate—but neither do you really want to let it go.

The weather was nothing short of glorious, the kind of day where just stepping outside puts an appreciative smile on your face. The entire week, in fact, had been so incredibly ideal that it was borderline suspicious, and in the days leading up to the weekend you felt it couldn’t actually stay that way through the wedding day. But here it was—literally not a cloud to be found in the crystalline blue skies, a light wind coming off the river, with temperatures climbing to an ideal seventy degrees. It was hard not to take that as an omen for what lay just ahead.

About one o’clock, photographer Jerry Turba and his associate came by the house—and we immersed ourselves in photos and photos and photos…of the girls separately, with their sister brides, with their bridesmaids, with their flower girls, with Grace, and of course, with Mom and Dad. How can standing still and smiling be so exhausting? Still, it was fun, part of the buildup. And the girls were all just radiant, the only word to do them justice. They were nervous, surely, but any nerves were overwhelmed by the sheer joy of anticipation realized.

Eventually even Jerry couldn’t think of any more photographs to take, so we were done.

It was time. The bridesmaids shuttled off down to the church, as did Deb and I, and in a trailing SUV, the three brides.

Upon arriving, they slipped into an oratory space at one end of the church. A large white screen kept them from view of the wedding parties, including the three grooms, who were collecting in the adjoining gathering space. I stepped out for a moment to greet each of the boys with a hug and a word of encouragement, but they were as excited as the girls. And all three looked most handsome. Sam was in a vested tuxedo with white tie; Nick was in a trim, single-button tuxedo with a black tie; and Mike was in his dress navy blue uniform, looking as crisp as you expect naval officers to look in such situations.

Three hundred guests meant the church felt fairly full without being uncomfortable. The mid-afternoon sun had the windows glowing and gave the space precisely the warmth we had hoped for. It was magical.

Precisely at three, the processional music kicked up.

When all the other parents had taken their seats, I escorted Deb into the sanctuary. If I may say so, she was an especially beautiful mother of the brides. She wore a stylish, sleeveless, knee-length dress that was the color of burgundy wine, and she had had her shoes dyed to match. She looked smashing. Reaching our seats, I squeezed her hand, then slipped away and out the smaller of the two side doors. It was time to get Bride No. 1.

Katie came out from the oratory to meet me. As she took my arm, I looked at her beaming smile and thought to myself, Was ever a bride more happy to be getting married? We slowly walked into the sanctuary space, bowed to the altar, then proceeded to where Nick, equally beaming, was waiting for her. I told her how much I loved her, gave her a chaste kiss on the cheek, then slipped her hand to her husband-to-be.

Again I left the sanctuary and arrived just as Claire emerged. She was every bit as happy as Kate, completely composed and just so pleased that this day had finally arrived. She didn’t appear nervous in the least as we walked in and headed down the aisle for Sam. He was stoic at first but relaxed as we came up, allowing himself a smile. Again, I leaned in to kiss my daughter, and give another man her hand.

One final loop to the back of the church. As I’ve said before, Helen is our emotional one, fully capable of crying at, say, a railroad crossing. So it wasn’t terribly surprising that, as she walked up to meet me, she was already working hard to fight back her tears. I hugged her and advised her to take a big breath. She wasn’t worried or even anxious, exactly—she was just so surpassingly happy that her emotions were in overdrive.

We walked in. When she caught sight of Mike, he smiled and she returned it, and I knew all was going to be fine. I kissed Helen’s cheek, gave Mike her hand—and asked him to take good care of her. “I will,” he said.

With that, I sat down next to Deb and proceeded to enjoy as lovely a wedding as I think I’ve ever seen. Of course, I’m hardly impartial about it. But too many other people later told me the same thing for me to doubt my reaction to what I witnessed.

The ceremony flowed seamlessly and hit precisely the tones the girls had wanted—majestic in parts but simple throughout; collective, naturally, but individual as well; spiritual but personal too. In their respective homilies about their couples, Fathers Jay, Sal and Tim offered humor, insight and stories in equal measure, and the vows went off without a hitch or glitch. Only Helen, again, got a little teary, and she was so soft-spoken that I can’t be sure she was actually saying what she was supposed to—although I’m sure she was, Fr. Tim being a stickler for details! Her sniffling got her sister brides sniffling too, but everyone got through it.

And speaking of sniffling…. In fact I did not go all blubbery, I’d have won that bet if I’d had had the courage to make it, which of course I didn’t. Indeed, a number of my friends commented that I seemed to maintain my composure. I replied that, in all honesty, I was just so happy about the couples’ own obvious happiness, about all I could do was smile. Later I saw a number of photographs taken during the service that proved it.

When the service was concluding—and in a brisk fifty-eight minutes!—Katie and Nick led the recessional, followed out by Claire and Sam. But at that point, a half-dozen of Mike’s groomsmen marched in, dressed in full naval regalia, and constituted the traditional Navy sword arch. At each “crossing,” the officers insisted that Mike and Helen kiss to continue on. After the final passage, Helen got another naval tradition—a friendly swat with a sword to her posterior. The audience was delighted and thrilled. Indeed, it was a touching and fitting finish to this extraordinary ceremony.

At the reception, I had the honor of formally welcoming all our guests and offer a toast to the three couples. I reprint it here because, really, it sums up how I felt about the entire occasion:

On behalf of Deb and Maria, Julie and Will and Marcia and Chuck—not to mention the brides and grooms—our heartfelt thanks to you all for coming from near and far to be here on this joyous day. We are especially pleased to have so many of our family members with us. And we are mindful, too, of our loved ones who look on from their places in heaven…where they are no doubt finding this little shindig a wonderful and welcome diversion from Grandma Niehaus’s terrible jokes.

Over the past year many of you have told us that a triple wedding is an extraordinary expression of the love that these sisters have for one another. I completely agree, of course. But that kind of bond could not exist without the nurturing and mentoring and example that was provided every day of the past 27 years by my wife, Deb. The girls know their father loves them very much, but I think they realized long ago that they are especially fortunate in their mother.

Parents quickly learn to gauge how their children are doing by the people they invite into their lives. Imagine how thankful and joyful Deb and I feel, knowing our girls have found such wonderful life partners in Nick, Sam and Mike. What can I tell you about them? All three are smart. All three are passionate, and about the right things. All are respectful and courteous, and all are thoroughly delightful company. Some would consider them rather handsome too, no? Most of all, of course, they love our girls. So Nick, Sam and Mike, on behalf of myself, my dad, my brother, my uncles and my male cousins, let me officially welcome you to the Kunkel Women spousal support group!

Julie and Will, Marcia and Chuck, and Maria and Tim—thank you for having raised such outstanding young men, and for being willing to share them with us.

Finally, I’d be terribly remiss if I didn’t acknowledge the world’s greatest—and busiest—maid of honor, our daughter Grace! From the inception of this idea, you handled your unique role with the kind of good humor and sensitivity and, well, grace, that few others could summon. We are all very proud of you!

And so we give thanks today for God’s many blessings on us. And let us toast the bride and groom…the bride and groom…and the bride and groom. Cheers!

Soon after, the three best men offered their toasts, all of which were delightful and poignant, albeit in very different ways—again, fitting the three-in-one theme of the entire day.

Then it was left to Grace for the final toast. She talked movingly about what she had learned from each of the couples. From Katie and Nick, she said, she had watched how they balanced their very heavy workloads with time for one another. From Claire and Sam, she said, she had come to appreciate the importance of spontaneity and engaging in activities that, while perhaps out of one’s own “comfort zone,” would be things one’s partner would enjoy. And from Helen and Mike, she said, she had been inspired by how dedicated and close they were despite—or perhaps partly due to—their long separations from one another.

As Grace went on, she began to choke up a bit, which in turn had her sisters going teary-eyed too. But she stayed strong as she closed. “I love these six people,” she said, “and I am extremely happy to officially welcome these three men into my family—although I have considered them brothers for a very long time now.”

After dinner the couples did three sets of lovely first dances. Which brought us to the last little bit of business for me—the father-daughter dances we’d worked on for several weeks. The deejay brought up the instrumental Moon River as Deb delivered Katie to me on the dance floor.

I looked directly at her. “Happy?” I asked, taking her into my arms.

“Very happy,” she said, smiling. And we went right into our waltz. As I’d hoped, I was really enjoying dancing with my daughter rather than worrying if I had the steps right.

It went flawlessly with Kate, as it did with Claire and then Helen, all of them beaming, and finally with Grace as the other three couples swirled around us.

People are arriving at the house now. No doubt they are hungry, and the stove is calling my name.

In a few weeks I will set down more fully what happened in the final week’s run-up to the wedding. But for now, let me say again that the word was, and is, love.

NEXT: The Week That Was.

Thomas Kunkel is president of St. Norbert College in De Pere, Wisconsin.

I Do, I Do, I Do (Ch. 14)

2010-10-01T05:36:00.000-07:00

The story of four daughters, three couples,

two parents and one very big wedding

By Thomas Kunkel

CHAPTER 14: BEST FOOT FORWARD

Click here for previous chapters: Ch.13 Ch.12 Ch.11 Ch.10
Ch.9 Ch.8 Ch.7 Ch.6 Ch. 5 Ch. 4 Ch. 3 Ch. 2 Ch. 1

October 1, 2010

The other day Grace asked me to look over what she had written for her maid of honor toast, which she’ll deliver at the wedding reception. As with all else in this wedding, she has to deal with not one bride but three—and sisters, to boot—so she is feeling something like triple the pressure to do well.

No surprise, given Grace’s sweet nature and writing talent, the sentiments she conveyed were touching and eloquently expressed. She’ll be fine. But reading this reminded me that I had yet to think about my own toast for the reception. So later that day, as I was driving the Wisconsin countryside on my way to a business meeting in Milwaukee, I started thinking about that little speech and what I would want to say in it. And much to my surprise I found myself starting to tear up.

Here we go….

Everything that can be planned has been planned, so as we get down to the wire we are mostly left to hoping—especially for good weather. Fortunately, autumn is right on schedule in northeast Wisconsin, and the leaves are taking on their color as if they have been reading the wedding playbook. So our only remaining wish is that it won’t be raining on October 9. If it’s not too cool, even better, but mostly we’re hoping it doesn’t rain. We’ve asked the Norbertine fathers to go straight to the top—to St. Norbert himself—to call in any favors they may have.

The only other remaining piece of business is the fancy footwork.

You’ll recall that many journal entries ago I talked about pursuing dance lessons so that I might have a proper father-daughter dance with the girls. Now, you may have chalked up my delay to the usual procrastination, and to some extent I won’t deny that. But in truth, the main reason I waited so long to start the lessons is so I couldn’t get rusty before I got to show my moves in the first place.

Over the summer a friend of mine, Michael Frohna, asked how the wedding planning was going. I said things were going along fine, but that I still hadn’t moved toward finding someone to teach me how to navigate a ballroom.

Michael lit up, said he and his wife were taking lessons with a wonderful dance instructor who specialized in individualized attention. Her name was Janet Gollnick, and Michael got to know her when Janet oversaw the choreography for Michael and other prominent locals who participated in a Dancing With the Stars-type charity event here last year. “You and Deb should definitely give her a call,” he said. “She’s wonderful.” He gave me her contact information.

I thanked him, took the information home—and set it down on my bureau for a few months. But in time that circled “October 9” on the calendar began to taunt me, so I retrieved Michael’s information and sent Janet an e-mail:

“On October 9 my wife Deb and I will see three of our daughters (we have four in total) get married at Old St. Joe. Deb and I are interested in getting some rudimentary dance lessons so I can do a respectable father-daughter dance. Beyond that, because we have three brides, we have an idea for a first dance that will involve all the girls and their new grooms. I can explain the idea but it will need some choreography, as you might imagine. Anyway, I thought I’d get in touch to see if this is something that might appeal to you.”

I hit “send”—and immediately began second-guessing myself. Would I look like an idiot? Would there be enough time to not look like an idiot? Would it even be fair to the girls to try something like this when they have so much else to worry about? Would the Austrian legation lodge an official protest over what we were doing to their national patrimony?

But the next afternoon Janet sent her reply: “Yes, I would love to help with the first-dance choreography and training for the brides and grooms, and would love to teach you and your wife. What a wonderful opportunity for me—it has never been my privilege to work with three daughters as they become brides…. I look forward to your call and to the teaching. Janet.”

So there it was; well-advised or not, we were on our way. As wise old Ecclesiastes said, it’s time to dance.

Mid-evening at the DanceSport studio in downtown Green Bay. The hardwood dance floor is commodious yet intimate, like a nice-sized living room stripped of furniture. It feels all the more intimate as it’s just Janet and Helen watching me waltz Deb around the floor like Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers’ less accomplished aunt and uncle.

Well, just Janet and Helen and the camera guy from WLUK-Channel 11.

As the wedding has come closer, the local media have rediscovered the story. We have talked to various Green Bay stations and just did a long interview with the Green Bay Press-Gazette for a feature story that is scheduled to appear shortly before the wedding.

But a program on Channel 11, Good Day, Wisconsin, pitched us with a unique angle. They wanted to focus on all the various local vendors we are using, for a veritable series of reports on the wedding. So they have talked to Chef Lindsey the cake-baker, photographer Jerry Turba, the hair stylist, the florist, and so on. And because they’d heard we were taking dancing lessons, they wanted to know whether they could come out and film us. Janet didn’t mind, and, perversely, we didn’t either. What’s the point of embarrassing yourself if there’s no one to see it?

So as we went through our paces, the young cameraman quietly filmed away. Once or twice I noticed him lowering the camera to floor level, presumably to capture that dazzling footwork. Right on cue my feet improvised an ugly two-step that I guarantee you is not found in any instruction book, completely throwing Deb and stopping us dead. Hmmm..… maybe this wasn’t such a good idea.

A charming and graceful woman, Janet is also an experienced teacher. She is unfailingly encouraging but at the same time not especially indulgent of one’s newbie-ness. She believes in plunging you into dance more or less the way your equally loving dad might have steered you straight onto a busy freeway to teach you how to drive.

Within our first minutes together, Janet had showed Deb and me the basic box step of the waltz, and before long we were getting comfortable enough with it to begin moving about the floor in a gentle, if tentative, rotation. It felt a bit awkward at times, as we could see in one another’s moving lips the earnest counting of steps. But as the footwork became a little more second-nature, I relaxed and let my feet go into more of a gliding motion, not as jerky. Deb did too. Catching occasional glances of my wife and I in the mirror, it actually didn’t look too bad. We were dancing!

A waltz, of course, is defined by a three-count beat. One two three, one two three… When we think of the dance, we also typically imagine the timeless Viennese music of the Strausses. But all sorts of songs in effect are waltzes. Stephen Sondheim’s poignant Send in the Clowns is a waltz (indeed, the show that number comes from, A Little Night Music, is composed entirely of waltzes). The traditional tune Greensleeves is a waltz, and so is Heartland’s recent country hit (and wedding staple), I Loved Her First.

Janet got us on the subject of music, because it was important to quickly settle on what our selection would be. We kicked around a few possibilities, but one evening Janet played us a sprightly instrumental version of Moon River. It had been brought to her attention by one of her dance assistants, a tall young man named Rane, who thought it might work for this. Henry Mancini's enduring tune is wonderful, of course, and the tempo of this version hit us as just right for dancing a comfortable waltz. And since it was quite short, we could repeat it for each daughterly turn. So this would become our soundtrack as we went through our paces.

With the music selected, Janet quickly began to choreograph a simple but elegant routine for me to dance in succession with each daughter. I will now describe it here, and if you waltz, this will seem very clear and straightforward to you. If you don’t, well, just take my word for it, it’s deceptively elegant, even when danced by a rank amateur.

Deb will lead one bride to the center of the dance floor, where I’ll be waiting for her. After we acknowledge one another, I’ll take my daughter into my arms with the start of the music. We will first execute eight simple box steps, rotating all the way, after which the daughter will do a graceful spin beneath my arm. We will then transition to a “spiral” progression for another run six beats, after which she will do another underarm turn, finishing with a light flourish to the audience. At that point, Deb will be escorting out the next daughter, and so on. The dance will end with me waltzing with Grace and the three couples dancing with one another.

Janet kept drilling us. Sometimes she danced with me, sometimes with Deb, and sometimes with both of us. And of course, Deb and I danced together quite a bit, validating the feeling I’d had for some time that we would enjoy learning to properly dance. Janet even showed us how the waltz can easily morph into a foxtrot or rumba. I’m already planning how, once the wedding is over, my wife and I might actually get out for an old-fashioned dinner-dance date!

After our first few lessons Helen joined in as well. She had just returned from a visit to Maryland, where she was bridesmaid in a friend’s wedding and got the chance to bring her sisters up to speed on the wedding plans. Helen, our natural-born athlete, took to the steps easily. She danced in heels the same elevation as her wedding shoes, so she could get accustomed to the feeling. That made her exactly the same height as me, which I found a little unsettling.

It had taken a couple lessons, but I was finally getting somewhat familiar with the routine. Still, I kept running into trouble during the first of the turns. I realized that at that point I was not lined up the way I had begun the dance, and in trying to “correct” for that I was starting to think about what my feet were doing—and thinking is fatal in a novice dancer. I was almost literally tripping over myself.

With much patience Janet finally got me over that hurdle, at least when I was dancing with her. Going over the routine with Helen, however, I was still having trouble with the turn. But with Janet’s sharp eye, we finally figured that out, too. In doing her turn, Helen was making a tight little pirouette, in place. But she was supposed to make more of a full turn, almost like she was taking a mini-stroll. When she executed the step that way, it created enough time for us to come back together the way Janet’s play was drawn up.

I did another run-through with her, which went much better. Then I did one final practice run with Janet. We finished with a turnout flourish to our imaginary audience, then bowed to one another.

“That’s beautiful, really lovely,” Janet said. “Let’s print that one.”

I smiled, imagining myself for just a moment in white tie and tails. Maybe we’ll pull this off yet.

Amid all this last-minute activity, I celebrated a birthday. I won’t say which one, but if you are of a certain age yourself you’ll know it as the same figure the feds made us loathe in the ‘70s when, during the energy crisis, it became the national speed limit.

Now, I don’t get too excited about birthdays, especially my own, but it didn’t take me long to notice that Wisconsinites take great pleasure in them. In fact, it’s our custom at St. Norbert College that every employee, on his or her birthday, gets a congratulatory e-mail from the president. The e-mail links them to a comic video that features me firing up an acetylene torch. (And yes, it was as much fun to film as it sounds.)

At any rate, this particular Friday afternoon I was in my office, minding my own business. I may even have been snacking on some Whoppers, the chocolate-covered malted milk balls that I have a bit of a weakness for.

About 2 o’clock, faculty and staff began poking into my office, in two’s and three’s, to wish me a happy birthday. That was not a little suspicious in and of itself. But the truly odd thing was, they all came bearing gifts—and the gifts were all the same. Cartons and boxes and bags…of Whoppers.

The folks from Mission and Heritage brought in a Whopper cake. The little kids from the day-care center brought in tiny packets of Whoppers. Brian Pirman, a professor of graphic design, brought in a giant Whopper box he had made up, showing my face artfully plugged into the Whoppers logo where the O is supposed to be.

Turns out that a few days earlier those fun-loving sisters in my office, Amy and Jamie, had arranged to send the entire campus an e-mail letting folks know my birthday was coming up, that they were all invited to come by for a piece of cake—and by the way, that it might be nice if they brought me a present of Whoppers.

For the purposes of that one note, incidentally, I was removed from the campus e-mail system. As I didn’t even know we could do that, this was a handy piece of information.

Anyway, the whole event put an altogether contemporary spin on the ancient Norbertine concept of communio. And now I have about a hundred boxes of Whoppers stowed in the office-supply closet.

Fortunately, as there’s no actual food product in Whoppers, they can never go bad.

NEXT: Wedding bells.

Thomas Kunkel is president of St. Norbert College in De Pere, Wisconsin.

I Do, I Do, I Do (Ch. 13)

2010-09-01T05:11:00.000-07:00

The story of four daughters, three couples,

two parents and one very big wedding

By Thomas Kunkel

CHAPTER 13: ROUNDING THE TURN

Click here for previous chapters: Ch.12 Ch.11 Ch.10 Ch.9 Ch.8 Ch.7 Ch.6 Ch. 5 Ch. 4 Ch. 3 Ch. 2 Ch. 1

September, 2010

As I write, the wedding is little more than four weeks away. Through this unusually warm summer it seems entire weeks have clipped away like days used to. And when I talk about the wedding lately I find myself regarding it as much more a real thing, not just the idea of a thing that until now was still out in the ether somewhere, like Neptune, or my retirement.

That means I’m also thinking more about the ceremony itself, how that will unfold, what kind of day it will be—and what kind of control I will have, or not. As a rather emotional type anyway, I wonder increasingly whether I’ll be able to make that trip down the aisle of Old St. Joseph Church three times without turning into a blubbering mess.

My God, people, I’ve got three daughters getting married! Who let this happen?

Yes, this concept of elastic time, it’s just one of the many things bending my mind these days. (Also: Are we really banning the Chicken Dance at the reception? Is that even legal?)

I ask you, girls: How can the month remaining until October 9 be racing so quickly, when the month I spent beside each of you in the car, logging the parentally supervised driving that Maryland requires for teens to get a license, seemed such an eternity?

How can we have gone from birth to marriage in a metaphorical snap of the fingers when I’m still recalling those endless afternoons of your first soccer matches, which were not so much competitions between two readily discerned teams as much as one big scrum that slowly roamed around the field, like a robo-mower?

Or those softball games when you were first allowed to pitch to one another—games that basically went walk, walk, walk, walk, walk, walk, a dad killing himself, walk, walk, third-baseman twirling her hair, walk, walk, walk, a mom killing herself…..

And by the way, did that make me a bad dad, because as I was watching I was excruciatingly aware of the time, the dripping time, the time I thought I could be doing something more tangibly constructive, the time I knew I would never have back?

Or did that make me a good dad, precisely because I did put in the time, rooting you on, no matter how much time it took? Inquiring minds want to know.

I’m not sure at what point a dad knows how he “did.” As you know, there’s something in the American makeup that compels us to keep score, especially as to a final reckoning of some kind. But when is parenting “final”? When I am eighty-five and you are sixty? On second thought, don’t answer that question….

Sure, there are certain universal signposts along the way where a parent naturally takes stock. If your kid clearly isn’t the village idiot in her kindergarten class; if she’s not peddling drugs when she’s thirteen; if she hasn’t dropped out of high school; if she drives a car and seems as comfortable with the brake as with the accelerator—well, maybe you didn’t get it all wrong.

But what is it? What, really, did you do, Dad?

I’ve known folks who went into parenthood with a real plan. They wanted to try to “shape” their kids like a bonsai gardener, carefully controlling every element that they could. Other parents I know took a more free-form approach—let the child grow to whatever she wants to be. Either way is a crapshoot—as is every child, really—and besides, as far as I know no one has ever circumvented the Law of Unintended Consequences. Life happens.

For you girls, I would say Mom and I tried to walk a kind of middle course. We didn’t have any grand designs for you—except we were intent on giving you the opportunity to explore what you wanted to explore, to build up your confidence, to learn what you were good at and what you might enjoy. We certainly wanted to see you educated to the best of our means. But first and foremost, what we wanted for each of you was that you would grow to be a good and caring person, respectful of others and of yourself.

Mom just read that last section and said I might want to add that when she used to fill out school forms that asked what we wanted for you (needless to say, this is the first I’m hearing there even were such forms), and other parents would write that they hoped their kids would be astronauts or biochemists, she would simply say, “I want them to be happy.”

Toward that end, I guess you might say we tried to parent by example, by the lives we led and by the decisions we made. In so doing, we purposely didn’t screen a lot from you, because you needed to know that even moms and dads have flaws that must be understood, worked on, endured or compensated for.

So you saw early on that your dad has something of a temper. Given my through-and-through Germanic genes, I have a superior talent for repressing frustrations until they no longer can be repressed, at which point they sometimes erupt like those shooting solar flares you learned about in sixth-grade science. Shrewdly, you also figured out pretty early that this ire is quick to recede—usually followed by a wave of guilt (that’s the Catholic, not the German) that could prove pretty useful to you.

You learned that Dad is impetuous and not infrequently impulsive—that I want what I want, when I want it. This can be a charming trait…in a four-year-old; not so much in a grown man. (I’m still working on that…yes, really, I am.) Similarly, I can be absurdly impatient. How many movies did you endure when I got so bored that I started a sarcastic running commentary, trying to prod a family walkout?

And you came to be aware that often—too often—I wasn’t there, be it honors night at the school, your art show, or one or two pet funerals. Not that I didn’t want to be there (well, some of those recitals….), but more often than not I just couldn’t. I was working in jobs that required a lot of after-hours time, and a fair amount of travel.

But that’s just one of the many things that made your mom and me a good team, I think. She has a capacity for putting in the time that, to me, can beggar belief. You saw that, and you appreciated it. You somehow knew that she was not only representing herself but carrying my proxy. And you also saw the many other ways she complemented, or counteracted, my own character traits. You saw how she did what she needed to to neutralize or shield the bad, and to celebrate the good.

That’s called being a spouse—and maybe was the best lesson of all to young women about to sign on for the long journey with these young men who, while outstanding fellows, will doubtless bring along their own challenges and idiosyncrasies…as will you.

Back to time.…

I’m thinking now of the evenings we’d spend out on the screened porch and just talk about things. Or Saturday mornings when you would instruct me, as the princesses you then were, whether it was to be waffles, pancakes or French toast. Or those family meetings, which we all understood were sort of corny even as we all fully appreciated their importance. Or the time spent rolling around on the living room floor with you and our cats Ed (the good-hearted, simple one) and Lyle (the evil-hearted, sophisticated one).

I’m remembering the times I built you things when you were small. In retrospect that was some of the most “dadlike” behavior I engaged in, I guess, but of course I enjoyed the building just as much as you liked the receiving.

I was reminded of that not long ago when we cleared out the Maryland house. Mom was in the attic sending things down the ladder to me. Suddenly she was maneuvering through the opening the legs of a small blonde table, and then two small matching chairs. I hadn’t seen them in years and they made me smile. When Claire was a toddler I made them so she and Katie would have a place to draw and color together. That play-set became a family fixture. And then about the time Helen came along, I built you all a play “kitchen” unit with a moppet-sized rangetop (complete with “burners”), oven, and sink (with “sprayer”). As I made it out of three-quarter-inch plywood, that thing was heavier than some of the cars we’ve owned, and I can’t believe how many times we moved it. But you girls and your friends used it hard over the years.

There were the treehouses (remember the annual post-Halloween “pumpkin tosses”?) , and that curious ramp I engineered in the backyard that turned your red Radio Flyer wagon into a poor woman’s roller-coaster. That was a big hit with your friends, too.

Maybe the time I still remember the most was one summer afternoon in Indiana, in 1997. As I say, when you were very young we moved around a lot. In fact, one year, because of the timing of our move from Arizona to California, Katie found herself in three different kindergartens! Still, you all had been so young that, for all you knew, everyone lived this kind of vagabond existence. You never complained. (Well, almost never. Part of the family lore is when our friends Clint and Carolyn came to visit us in San Jose. As we all piled into our van to take a little tour of the area, five-year-old Claire asked in her most plaintive voice, “Are we moving again?” To this day Clint enjoys reminding me about that.)

But this move was to be different. I had been on my own as a book and magazine writer for five years, and every bit of it was wonderful, kind of like an extended sabbatical. But by this point I needed to get another “grownup” job, and I had been offered a great one in Maryland that I couldn’t really afford to turn down.

By then you ranged in age from thirteen to eight, you had established friends, and you had grown close to your Indiana cousins and other relatives. You had teams. You had a backyard with a swing. You had a real home that you had grown to love. Now, well over a decade later, this image remains so clear to me: All of you sitting on the living room couch, four ducks in a row, as we break the news of the move to you—and almost in unison you start to cry, and not just petulant whimpers but serious emotional torment. It nearly killed Mom and me. She is so much stronger than I am, and it was I who, in the face of your pain, was sorely tempted to blurt, “Okay, we’ll stay.” But by that point, staying was not an option.

To your great and everlasting credit, you stopped crying, you made the move like big girls, and you didn’t hold it against us or otherwise try to exploit the guilt we felt. It was an impressive display of maturity on the part of kids so young, and we were proud of you. Indeed, in short order you embraced your new home, which you found to be beautiful and exciting and so full of adventure. You made lives there, and found new people there.

Including some very lucky young men.

It’s funny what time can do.

Pretty much every conversation now, people ask me how the wedding is going. They ask in a way that suggests I must be navigating all the details crashing in on me like a man trying to claw his way out of an avalanche.

They’ve got it half right—the details are crashing in…just not so much on me. The RSVPs are coming back in. Helen is working with Fr. Sal and Fr. Jay to finalize the wedding ceremony program. She’s working on the music, too, and she and Deb just met with the catering and cafeteria staff to compare notes on the reception. We’re coordinating the travel of the various wedding parties. Maybe most amazing, we’re trying to make sure that we can get two of the three couples to the Brown County clerk’s office literally the day before the wedding to make sure they get their marriage licenses. Nothing like a bit of last-minute pressure to keep things interesting.

But for me? Well, I just nod…. Yes, yes, it’s crazy, all right. I don’t have the heart to tell people that the level of my concern about the “details” is whether I should go ahead and get my hair cut now so that it’s ready for a trim a week before the wedding, or whether I should wait a while longer.…

As the RSVPs return, we’ve been doing regression analysis (or something like it) all along the way, and it now looks like we’ll probably wind up with between 350 and 400 people in attendance—just about the right number to have a very full church without anyone feeling claustrophobic.

More to the point, that would be a great number for the reception. We recently had our annual Faculty and Staff Dinner in the same campus cafeteria space where the reception will be held. The dinner is our traditional kickoff for the new school year, and there were about 450 current and retired faculty and staffers jammed into the space. It worked fine for that, but it would be challenging to have that many and still carve out the kind of floor space one would need for, say, a respectable Chicken Dance.

NEXT: Best Foot Forward.

Thomas Kunkel is president of St. Norbert College in De Pere, Wisconsin.

I Do, I Do, I Do (Ch. 12)

2010-08-01T07:16:00.000-07:00

The story of four daughters, three couples,

two parents and one very big wedding

By Thomas Kunkel

CHAPTER 12: SUMMER SHOWERS

Click here for previous chapters: Ch.11 Ch.10 Ch.9 Ch.8 Ch.7 Ch.6 Ch. 5 Ch. 4 Ch. 3 Ch. 2 Ch. 1

August, 2010

So many things a man won’t do unless forced at gunpoint: Shave on his day off. Read instructions. Ask for directions. Give up his nasty, tatty yet somehow lucky Notre Dame Fighting Irish hat. (Sorry, Nick.)

Surely at the top of any such list, however, is attending a “shower” of any kind. These days I gather it’s not uncommon for young men to get pulled into “couples” baby showers, though any guy who says he really looks forward to such a thing is flat lying to you. But a bridal shower, even in this altogether liberated and sensitive age of ours, remains pretty much a testosterone-free environment.

On a Saturday afternoon early in July, on their mother’s birthday, Katie, Claire and Helen were guests of honor at a triple bridal shower. Nearly fifty female family members and friends gathered for the party, which was held in the pleasant community room of the apartment complex where my mom and dad live, in Evansville, Indiana.

As the Maid of Honor Cubed, Gracie was technically the host, but early on she knew that planning a triple shower from out of town would be a challenge, so she recruited her cousins Michelle and Laura as co-hosts. Still, the prospect of doing some speaking in front of the group, not her favorite thing, had her a bit anxious. Also, given her heavy summer work schedule, she was going to be the last in the family to arrive in Evansville, literally the morning of the shower—not a confidence-inspiring thought given airline performance these days. But miracle of miracles, she arrived right on time, and the shower came together flawlessly, with the able assistance of her cousins, her grandmother and her Aunts Jean and Linda. The Kunkel clan has a deep bench down there in Indiana.

As for the brides, they were happier than happy, and why not? A shower means a wedding is officially transitioning from fantasy to reality, and they give you lots of presents! The girls were also delighted to be seeing so many of the friends made when they were youngsters in Indiana, now all grown and in several cases married ladies themselves. “And it was great to see all my cousins,” Katie added. “We are not only cousins at this point, but we’re all great friends, and it feels good to know that we will always be close.”

Michelle and Laura helped Grace create several games that fuel the fun that is a bridal shower. The first had involved asking the three grooms certain personal questions, then at the shower the girls were asked the same questions to see how well they knew their soon-to-be husbands.

Name one thing that you own that your fiancé will throw out the first chance he gets:

Mike—My flannel shirt; Nick—The mini-fridge; Sam—My running shorts.

You’ve gone to the store to pick up milk and decide to get your sweetheart a little something—what is it?

Mike—Flowers; Nick—Kit-Kat bar; Sam—Milk Duds or fruit snacks.

That kind of thing.

“My favorite question was, What famous person would Nick be?” Katie said. “I guessed that he said Jake Gyllenhaal, because he looks just like him. But Nick had answered in his e-mail to Grace something along the lines of, ‘I wouldn't want to be anyone else because then I wouldn’t be marrying your sister.’ I loved it—but I think it probably elicited a ‘Barf!’ response from most people.”

I was able to confirm that response.

This innocent little quiz also provided the kids some early insight into the psychological pitfalls of marriage. A perfect example was when the guys were asked to name the latest book they’d read. Helen knew perfectly well that Mike wasn’t a big book reader—I mean, he reads a lot, from fat Navy helicopter manuals to golf web sites, just not books—but Helen didn’t think he’d admit as much to a bunch of future family. So instead of going with her gut, she said Mike had probably read a book about investing, or maybe Texas hold’em.

“Wrong!” Grace announced. “Mike said he doesn’t read!”

Welcome to married life, Helen.

Anyway, by all accounts this particular competition was a rout. “Claire blew Helen and Katie out of the water,” was how Grace put it. “She quoted Sam almost word for word on some things.”

“I kicked Katie and Helen’s butt,” was how Claire put it, ever the diplomat. “And it was nice to find out that I know so much about Sam.”

(Sam, not that you asked, but if she knows you this well already you should be afraid—very afraid….)

Another game featured trivia about the girls, and the guests were asked to name which bride each fact pertained to—like, “Who used to be called Stinky?” (For the record, that would be Katie. Claire was Stumpy, and Helen Stretch—all for but a very brief time when they were infants, mind you, but for reasons that I suppose are obvious enough.)

As you can tell, I put my years of reporting experience to work to find out what was happening at the shower. But I had also told the girls all along that I probably would drop by at some point toward the end. I said it was because I wanted to see some of my mom’s sisters and other friends, which was certainly true. But it was also out of good old prurient curiosity, to get in there for the same reason that Margaret Meade wanted to get to Samoa.

The girls, surely suspicious of my motives, had uniformly replied that I couldn’t come, couldn’t violate the bridal shower code, if you will. But their opposition wasn’t so vociferous that I felt they really minded.

So about ten minutes to 3, as the shower was supposed to be drawing to its close, I walked through the door. There I confronted a roomful of startled-looking women, ages eight to eighty, all of whom started booing and hissing, as if I was Snidely Whiplash himself and had just tied up Nell on the railroad tracks.

They were teasing…I think. But in an instant I learned something important about bridal showers—they tend to last way longer than any “schedule” might suggest. Not only weren’t they finishing up yet, but turns out I’d arrived just in time for the Main Event itself. The three girls were seated up front, in little mini-thrones. They were each wearing paper tiaras. And they were in the process of receiving their largess, gift by gift, girl by girl. Each bride had a cousin next to her, carefully helping dispense with the ribbons and paper and logging every present. Out in the audience, meanwhile, the guests were playing a kind of Gift Bingo, covering the little boxes with Skittles and M&Ms when the girls got a gift that was on their card.

I’d slipped into a seat at the back of the room, with Mom and my aunts Rosie and Margaret, and I thoroughly enjoyed the scene. The matriarchal tribe had come together, as it has for centuries, and everyone was clearly having a wonderful time. So this was a bridal shower.

Yet at the same time I was feeling a distinct sense of unease…like I was about to get my Man card revoked.

Ahead of the bridal shower we spent a too-brief but enjoyable week at the farm. It was unusually mild weather for the season, the humidity put at bay for a few days, with skies of clear blue instead of their usual hazy white. Helen came down with us from Wisconsin; Claire, on summer hiatus from the classroom, was already there with Sam; and Katie and Grace drifted in as the week went along. Family came over for some cookouts, and I bought a small chainsaw and started thinning out some of the underbrush in the nearby woods. (This last was against Deb’s explicit orders, as it combines two things I’m not supposed to have—motors and sharp implements.)

A highlight for the girls and Sam was taking their friends to Holiday World, a quaint amusement park in rural southern Indiana that they have loved since they were small. The park is located in the village of Santa Claus, which once a year gets attention because people send Christmas letters there for the postmarking. My Mom’s parents actually grew up around Santa Claus, back in the turn-of-the-century years when German was still as commonly spoken as English, if not moreso. Even now, if you listen carefully, you can detect a faint Teutonic inflection in some of the speech in those remote parts.

After the shower it was time to return to Wisconsin. Tagging along were Claire, Sam and Sam’s mother, Maria, who was taking a short vacation to help with the wedding plans and get a first-hand look at where all the action would be taking place.

Of course, all work and no play can make even the loveliest young lady a bridezilla, so Deb, Maria, Helen and Claire did set aside one day for pedicures and other pampering at the decadent Kohler Spa, which is about an hour south of where we live—rather too close, in other words. But they’d all earned their relaxation. For after that, it was pretty much all wedding, all the time.

Dress fittings? Check. Veils? Check. Florist meeting to work out individual bouquets? Check. DJ coordination for the music? Check.

One full morning was devoted to the hair and makeup “trial.” Claire and Helen went in with red-carpet photos of the hairstyles they were looking for. Claire liked hers right off. There was more experimentation with Helen’s look, but in the end she too was pleased. In any case, when they got home they both certainly looked lovely, and as such the test was deemed a success. This was crucial not only because the brides want to look their best, of course, but because there will be a virtual army of brides and bridesmaids going in that Saturday morning. The girls had to be confident not only of the stylists’ and cosmeticians’ artistry but industry. On T-Day (for Triple), the hair and makeup team will have a lot of beauty to turn out in not a lot of time.

Another morning was given over to the tuxedo fitting for Sam. Apparently his suit didn’t hang particularly well when he first tried it on, but after a number of adjustments responding to one fiancée and two moms, it looked great. “By the time we left he took my breath away,” Claire said. She showed me a photo of Sam in the tux that she took when they were done, and he did indeed look like a model. I hate him.

Maria thoroughly enjoyed all the prep activities, especially the fittings. “All of the vendors seemed genuinely excited about this triple wedding, working together and interested in making sure each couple remains unique,” she said later. “The dress and tux fittings were definitely ‘Wow!’ moments. Our kids sure are handsome and beautiful!” Indeed they are.

Form holding, yours truly was not invited to any of the foregoing activity. The only exception was the cake tasting, and that’s probably because Chef Lindsay of the Runaway Spoon and her husband, Tim, were coming over to the house with their wares, and evicting me from my own castle was perhaps too bold even for my girls.

We sat around the dining-room table and sampled mini-slices of the six varieties of cake that Lindsay brought. We tried the red velvet cake (Claire and Sam’s choice), lemon (for Kate and Nick), and raspberry amaretto with almonds (Helen and Mike’s), along with pink champagne, vanilla bean and chocolate decadence. The grooms’ cakes all will be the chocolate. To my admittedly amateur palate they all tasted wonderful.

The tasting was fun, and the matter of which varieties would go into which cakes was handled with admirable dispatch. Then as I was licking clean my fork, the conversation subtly turned to icing, and it got quite…well, protracted. There was a lot of serious back and forth about the icing. Then the icing discussion segued to fondant, which (like tulle) I guess I had heard of before but couldn’t tell you what it was if my life depended on it. I soon gathered that fondant is a kind of icing but not icing exactly, more of a candy-like confection that isn’t spread but rolled or draped onto a cake in sheets. Interesting, but not exactly Council on Foreign Affairs stuff.

Nevertheless, a robust discussion continued about the pros and cons of fondant until I thought my head would explode. So I quietly slipped away from the table, knowing full well I would not be missed in the slightest, which of course I wasn’t. A half-hour later I walked by the table and the fondant discussion was still going strong—and I thought to myself, this is why dads are neither needed nor wanted in such gatherings. No good could possibly come of it.

Still, the key was that all was going quite well, and my daughters were content with how things were progressing. And not just with the details per se, but with the helpful attitude they were encountering with everyone they met in regard to the wedding.

“It’s nice getting to meet people so passionate and professional,” Claire would say after meetings with both Lindsay and the wedding florist. “I was really impressed with the selections they gave me and how willing they were to make my own unique bouquet and cake.”

I know what she means about that desire to please, and about the positive outlook generally. Anyone who lives here knows.

Our friends to the west have a phrase to describe an organic piece of their character, which is much parodied but true: Minnesota Nice. Well, the analogue here might just as readily be termed Wisconsin Welcome. A genuine sense of hospitality and friendliness pervades the landscape here. Our patrons, the Norbertines, have even incorporated the idea of “radical hospitality” into their mission.

You see it in the simplest habits, as I noticed again just the other day. July was a record-breaker for rain in this part of Northeast Wisconsin, so when a recent Sunday dawned clear and dry, I got out my trusty Schwinn and went for a leisurely ride, north past the college and over the Claude Allouez Bridge to the Fox River Trail, which runs parallel to the water all the way from Green Bay to well south of De Pere. On the trail, I must have passed fifty fellow bikers, Rollerbladers, joggers and walkers. And literally all but a handful made a point of saying, “Good morning!” as I went by. And not in a perfunctory way; they meant it. It’s remarkable.

Wisconsinites are so intrinsically pleasant that newcomers, especially from the East Coast, will often spend their first few weeks sort of waiting for the other shoe to drop, so convinced that no one can actually be that nice.

From the trail I swung over to St. Norbert Abbey and stopped at the cemetery, which is laid out in a tranquil and shady spot west of the abbey building. I like to visit here when I get the chance; even a few moments’ reflection recharges the Norbertine heritage I have inherited with my appointment at St. Norbert College.

Though I’ve been here only two years, five priests of the order have been buried in that time, such is the actuarial reality of their aging membership. More than 160 marble crosses, arrayed in six neat rows, mark the graves of decades of De Pere Norbertines. The stones arc in either direction from a more substantial marker, that of the founder of both St. Norbert Abbey and St. Norbert College, Abbot Bernard Pennings. The first president of St. Norbert College died in 1955—coincidentally the year that I, the seventh, was born. The inscription at the bottom of his stone marker (his actual remains are contained in a crypt within the abbey) comes from the thirteen chapter of John: “By this will all men know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.”

Back home, I washed down a couple ibuprofen (hey, I just told you I was born in 1955!) with a soda and got back to work on this installment. This is the twelfth of my monthly journals, which means—and this is incredibly hard to believe, even as I type it—that we’re a full year into this show.

As so many people have asked us about the wedding, we have inadvertently been collecting miscellaneous wedding horror stories. For instance, just the other day when Deb and I were talking to some friends about the beauty and general reliability of Wisconsin weather in early October, they sheepishly said they themselves had been married in early October—and it had rained that day like Noah’s flood. Then they told us about a daughter who was to be married in a beautiful, expansive (read: expensive) tent at Green Bay’s Oneida Golf and Country Club. But record rainfall the night before the wedding left the wooden floor of the tent beneath six inches of water! So with a lot of scrambling, the large wedding instead went indoors.

Maybe the capper, though, was related by my St. Norbert colleague Bridget O’Connor, who recently related the unplanned excitement that marked her own wedding, in her hometown in eastern Minnesota.

As the hour drew nigh, bride Bridget and groom Jeff were ready, the flowers were in place, the guests were seated, the organist was at the keyboard, all was as it should be…with one small exception.

The priest was nowhere to be found.

He couldn’t be raised (these were pre-cellphone, pre-texting days, naturally) and no one had seen hide nor hair of him. It was becoming obvious that unless he’d been in an accident, he’d simply forgotten.

Nothing was to be done except to scare up a pinch-hitting priest (PHP), which within about a half an hour they had.

So the wedding kicks off, a bit late but otherwise smoothly. Bridget says the PHP was actually doing a beautiful job, especially given the bizarre circumstances, that by fifteen minutes or so into the service her blood pressure was finally returning to normal. Then suddenly, who does she spot standing in the wings? The first priest! He had been resurrected! And judging from the fact that he was wearing his vestments and was trying to signal the couple with some cocked eyebrows and nods, it was apparent that he intended to join them, mid-ceremony. The bride, meantime, with some subtle facial signaling of her own, was desperately trying to convey that he should do no such thing, that the service was going along swimmingly, that indeed dueling priests were not only overkill but would be quite confusing to one and all.

Alas, too late. The original cleric marched right in. The audience sat at attention. The PHP was startled to see him, needless to say, but he went ahead and stopped where he was, pulled off his microphone, handed it over and recused himself. The original priest then put on the mike, opened his book and continued the service right there, as if tag-teaming a wedding was no odder than tag-teaming a WWF bout.

Bridget laughs heartily in telling the story now, even though she was no doubt homicidal at the time. But that’s the point, really. In these stories, and in fact in all the stories we have heard in the past year, one thing is consistent—every wedding turned out beautifully, the mistakes become part of family lore, and the couples carry on no worse for the wear. (For proof from Bridget, check out http://www.snc.edu/p/communications/enews/0710/weddingparty.html)

Moral: Wedding hiccups happen, so you might as well enjoy them.

Hiccups happen: I think I’ve found my new mantra.

NEXT: Rounding the turn.

Thomas Kunkel is president of St. Norbert College in De Pere, Wisconsin.

I Do, I Do, I Do (Ch. 11)

2010-07-01T07:23:00.000-07:00

The story of four daughters, three couples,

two parents and one very big wedding

By Thomas Kunkel

CHAPTER 11: THE VIEW FROM THE OTHER SIDE

Click here for previous chapters: Ch.10 Ch.9 Ch.8 Ch.7 Ch.6 Ch. 5 Ch. 4 Ch. 3 Ch. 2 Ch. 1

July, 2010

I got home from work the other day and noticed a delivery had been left outside the front door. The name on the box was Zappos. Even I, hardly the most Web-savvy consumer around, recognized the name of this Internet peda-phenomenon.

I checked the box for heft (disappointingly light) and gave it a little shake. Then I looked for the addressee, expecting to find Deb’s name. Instead: Helen Kunkel. Hmmm. Zappos, Helen…..

Can you say wedding shoes?

The next evening Deb called. She was back in Maryland at the time, slaving to clear out our old home of more than a decade of family detritus before we closed on its sale. She had me on speakerphone when Helen suddenly interrupted.

“Dad, did a Zappos package come for me?”

I barely let her get the words out.

“Oh my gosh, Helen, they’re beautiful!”

“DAA-AD! You didn’t open the box, did you?”

“Well, of course I opened the box, Helen, how the heck was I supposed to know what Zappos is?”

“You didn’t, did you?”

“Helen, they’re going to look so great with your dress!”

“Daaaaad!!! Mom!!!”

Deb calmly intervened. “He didn’t open the box, Helen.”

“Dad—did you?”

Deb again: “Helen, remember, he doesn’t even know what your dress looks like.”

Pause. “Dad!!”

No, Helen, I didn’t open it. Tempted, I admit, but far more fun to stay in the dark and be able to tease you.

Deb succeeded in emptying out the Maryland house, primarily via a rolling, four-day yard sale and thus proving again that there is nothing so useless or beat up that people won’t buy if they think they’re getting a deal. You want proof? We’d just had the oak floors there refinished, and I asked Deb to please protect them from the rummagers picking through our stuff by putting down some of the old scruffy rugs we’d long since retired to the garage.

Two days into the yard sale I asked Deb about the floors. She said she had indeed been putting out the rugs to protect them—but people kept buying them.

Once Deb was done she headed back to Wisconsin, along with Helen and a sedan-full of Helen’s worldly goods.

As I said in my last entry, Helen is spending the summer with us to help finish up the wedding planning. In the meantime, though, she found out where she and Mike will be spending the first chapter of their married lives—in San Diego. That had been Mike’s first choice for a posting, not only for its marvelous year-round climate but because his family lives in southern California. As it’s in high demand by Navy officers, including eager young helicopter pilots, a San Diego assignment had felt like a bit of a longshot to Helen and Mike. Needless to say, they were ecstatic at the news.

“When I selected helicopters, I knew there was really only one community I wanted to get into—HSC, which stands for helicopter sea combat,” Mike explained in an email. “Our mission in HSC is search and rescue, vertical replenishment of ships, and combat logistics (i.e., putting Navy SEALs on boats and taking them off when they are done).

“Now that I got it, I’ll be heading down to San Diego to start my (HSC) training. It’s almost going to be like flight school again, except now they know I can fly. But I will be learning how to fly my new aircraft, the MH-60S Knighthawk, for the fleet squadron.”

With his new commission, Mike is now a lieutenant junior grade. He’ll be in this next phase of training for another six to eight months before getting his permanent station in a fleet squadron—and his first deployment. He could be attached to carriers, destroyers, cruisers or supply ships. He’s looking forward to seeing the wider world, he said, be it Japan or Indonesia or the Middle East. “But I also understand we have a job to do and that’s to support the troops on the ground—that’s all our job is. With that, I am super excited and can’t wait to get back to the west coast.”

We’re delighted for both of them, being just a few hours’ drive from the Lindsey family. That will be especially important to all of us when Mike is on one of his months-long assignments at sea. But this duty is precisely what Mike and Helen signed on for, and they’re excited. Besides that, they’re going to be living in a place just this side of paradise. As June drew to a close they flew out for some apartment-shopping and picked a lovely place with ample room for a guest bed.

Now where did I put that suitcase?

If you’ve been following this journal, by now you’ve read more than 35,000 words on what I think about the 3Wedding. But many of you have asked me, sensibly enough, what the parents of the grooms think about it—so I decided to ask them. Here’s what they had to say:

First up—Julie Lindsey, writing for herself and her husband, Will:

“It was May, 2005. I had flown out to Annapolis to watch the Naval Academy Class of 2008 climb the Herndon Monument, which signified that they were no longer plebes. I met up with Michael and he briefed me on the events of the day. Then he said, in a humble way but with obvious excitement, that he was going to take a girl named Helen to dinner and a prom after-party that night—he hoped I didn’t mind traveling 3,000 miles to visit him, only to be left in a hotel room all alone. Seeing the excitement on his face, how could I say anything but, ‘Of course I don’t mind, sweetheart.’

“The next day I drove Michael to the home of his sponsor family, the Perrets. I intended to just drop him off so he could get dressed. But Colleen Perret said, ‘Julie, you need to come with us to the picture-taking, because Helen’s mom wants to meet you and Michael and will not let her daughter go out with Michael unless she approves of him.’ I felt a little nervous, but I knew that Michael would win Debbie over. (As for myself, I was very quiet—which is very rare for me, just ask anyone who knows me!)

“Well, Debbie must have given her thumbs-up, and we watched as Helen and Michael drove off for their first date. I didn’t see Michael till 10 the next morning. I’d wanted to spend the rest of the day with him, but he’d had no sleep. So once we were back at the hotel, out he went. Not exactly the weekend I’d planned, but I was excited to be part of the beginning of Helen and Michael’s relationship.

“Every summer our family meets in Lake Tahoe for a weeklong camping trip. I was surprised when Michael called and asked if Helen could join us. Once again Debbie and I talked, and I assured her that they would sleep in the tent trailer with Will and me, and the week would be ‘G-rated.’ Michael was so excited and couldn’t wait to share this family time with Helen. Since then Helen has joined our family in Tahoe in 2006, 2007 and 2009.

“July 2006 would be their first dating anniversary, and Michael made big plans! He consulted with me many times—what about this, what do you think about that, everything designed to sweep a girl off her feet. He presented her with a certificate that confirmed a star was named after her, and that afternoon they went on a parasailing ride, and the evening closed with dinner at a lake-view restaurant. It was clear Michael was head-over-heels in love with this young lady, and Michael was not alone. Our family loves her so much, too.

“Tahoe 2007 was probably the one year Helen was not happy. It wasn’t so much that a bear literally walked six feet beside her, but the fact that Michael’s aunt attempted to lure the bear back by putting a cake out in the middle of the camp.

“Tahoe 2009 was the year we will remember for a long time. We all gathered for the wedding of Michael’s cousin as well as our annual camping trip. The morning of the wedding, Michael took Helen for a hot-air balloon ride, where he asked her to marry him. We all knew the day would come, because Michael alone is an awesome young man, but when you see him with Helen he is truly complete.

“During the five years Michael and Helen have been dating, we have had the pleasure of spending time with Katie, Claire and Grace. When we learned that Katie and Claire had also been proposed to, Will and I would have been honored to be invited to their weddings. We were thrilled when we heard the girls were planning a triple wedding. Probably our only concern was that each of the couples would be able to feel their personal touches and the day would be special to each of them.

“Michael’s sister, Jenny, has thought of Helen like a sister from the day they met, and she was honored that Helen asked her to be one of her bridesmaids. She tried on her dress when we were visiting her in Texas and she looked absolutely stunning.

“The frosting on the cake for Will and me was when we heard Helen and Michael would be living in San Diego (about a three-hour drive for us) after they are married. I joked with Michael that I was shopping for a tent trailer and would come to visit every weekend. I don’t think he thought that was such a great idea, but when I proposed this to Helen she was so sweet: ‘Oh yes, Julie, we would love to have you come and stay with us.’

“I would like to reiterate how much we love Helen and the Kunkel family, and we look forward to many family gatherings, as distance will allow. Michael still glows when Helen walks into the room, and as a mom I know I will be putting him in loving arms.”

This is from Chuck Stewart, writing for himself and wife Marcia, about their son Nick:

“When we first heard that there was to be a triple wedding I have to admit I wasn’t overly excited about the prospect. As you might imagine, I wondered about diluting the specialness of the occasion. I didn’t want the spectacle of a Triple Wedding to detract from the solemnity of the occasion. I suppose the title of your blog—‘I Do, I Do, I Do’—expressed my initial concern: that the ceremony had the potential of being an ‘I do, me too, and ditto,’ type of event. That fear involved the mammalian old brain, I’m afraid.

“But after the particulars began trickling in, the never-tiresome story of best friends wanting to be together for life, and thinking of your intended as ‘coming home’ and pairs of loved ones always ‘having your back,’ I realized (with a higher order of reasoning) that something extraordinary was brewing. Getting out of the way of myself, I considered the unique family and sisterly love that must be present to share this singular life event together. We have to admire and respect the job you and Deb have done as parents that your daughters, being the unique and special individuals they are, chose to commemorate this most august occasion together as sisters and new brides.

“We were also struck with the inescapable symbolism of where all three of the couples most wanted to profess their love and their desire to be together forever. In each instance they chose a place of majesty and mystery, a kind promise to move into the unknown together, their adventure beginning together on the edge of the natural world, signifying beauty, mystery, and purity. Then again, maybe we’ve just seen too many old movies—but still, it wasn’t the ‘ring in the champagne’ gambit.

“We would like to take more credit than we probably deserve for the young man that Nick has become. Only natural, right? We didn’t give him a lot of advice when he was young (might be some differing opinions on this). With respect to doing schoolwork, we didn’t require A’s, only that he did his best. He’s taken this to heart, it seems, and when he decides to do something he gives it everything he’s got.

“When the conversations drifted into the hows and whys of our long marriage, I told him that I thought the key to happiness is to choose a person you think is smarter than you, and that the successful approach to a long relationship is to make sure from the start that it’s a partnership. I know this struck a chord with him because his sister and he used to say (complain) that ‘Mom and you are always on the same page, it’s like talking to the same person.’ None of this ‘Dad said it was OK’ if I do such and such. I am sure you know of what I speak.

“We are gratified that Nick has ‘partnered’ with Katie, whom we know as passionate, smart and beautiful. We had to laugh a little when you mentioned in one of your chapters that the Stewarts had adopted Katie. You don’t know how true that is. We took to her immediately, seeing her intelligence, ambition, and love for our son, and to be sure she has already become part of the family. She passed the ‘going on vacation with the Stewarts’ acid test with flying colors (remind to me tell you about the ‘Donner Party’ vacation to Williamsburg some years back).

“We are a small but devoted family. There is not a plethora of aunts or uncles or cousins within shouting distance, or paternal grandparents. Just a single high-quality Nana, a doting aunt, an extremely close sister—Katie—and her fabulous husband, Mike. Nick marrying into a large family is very comforting to us. And I ask you, is there any better beginning than a triple wedding to start things off? Imagine the possibilities.”

And finally, this is from Maria Kaiser, about her son Sam.

“Just prior to typing my thoughts for the wedding journal, I did another Google search under ‘Kunkel Triple Wedding St Norbert.’ It’s exciting how much coverage this event has received to date—plus it’s fun to see your kid’s picture and name ‘out there.’

“My son Sam Kaiser will marry his best friend Claire Kunkel. They’ve already been through some good times and some tough times—taking care of each other, remaining true, respectful, loving and supportive of one another’s goals. I am going to De Pere this month for a short visit with Sam and the Kunkel family. It will be fun to see where all of this will take place and to possibly catch Debbie in ‘Big Deb Mode.’ The woman is amazing and seems to have planning down to an art.

“I was re-reading the story (with picture) that the Milwaukee paper carried about the wedding. One of the comments from a reader was this: ‘One out of every two marriages ends in divorce. Which couple in the picture will it be?’ He or she is obviously not the well-wisher type.

“Well, here’s some good news concerning marriage statistics: my parents, Don and Betty Becker—Sam’s grandparents—have been married 50 years. My brother, two sisters and I recently hosted a 50^th wedding anniversary party for them. We had around 130 family and close friends. By the way, Tom (Sr.) and Mary Lou Kunkel were there—Claire’s grandparents—themselves married 56 years this month. Tom grew up across the street from my dad (a small-world thing). Also present were Dan and Sharon Kaiser, Sam’s other grandparents—married 49 years.

“I asked my mom and dad if they would list the ‘secrets’ to a happy, successful marriage. Here’s what they had to say:

Mom’s list:

1. Share the same basic principles regarding moral behavior and religious faith

2. Patience

3. Equality

4. Temperance

5. Sense of humor

6. Self-sacrifice

7. Sensitivity

8. Respect the other’s opinion

9. Duty-bound

10. Agree on use of money

11. Reasonably active social life

12. Forgiveness

13. Tolerance

Dad’s list:

1. We have found out that marriage is a 100 percent sharing of responsibilities instead of the so-called 50-50 percent

2. Respect each other’s right to some privacy in their lives—it’s nice to have quiet time each day

3. Share each other’s opinions on the proper values you wish to instill in your children and arrive at an agreement

4. Do not put off having children for too long or you might fall into the trap of “not being able to afford a family”

5. Do not live beyond the lifestyle that you can afford (“act your wage”)

6. Start being generous with your time and money at the start of marriage—budget so that you will have something left over to help a person in need

7. Deny yourself reasonably—learn the meaning of the word “no”

8. Make plans to be with each other alone at least once a month (minimum)—every two weeks is better

9. Participate in a religious service weekly

10. Remember your birthdays and anniversaries and try to celebrate

11. Each partner should develop a hobby of some sort to do by themselves

12. When you have a spat of some kind, you should make up and smooth things over before retiring for the night—both will sleep better

13. Admit when you are wrong—good for the soul

14. Compliment each other daily on each other’s accomplishments

15. Participate in church and civic activities, but with moderation; do not take too much time away that should be spent with each other or family

16. If possible, try to live off of one income; this would require sacrifice and self-denial of both parents, but it’s ideal for children

“I will be there on October 9, 2010—wishing my son Sam and Claire well…..hoping and praying that all three couples have a happy, long life together.”

That abundance of excellent advice, offered by people who have been there, is a good place to end this installment—except to say that these observations are all the evidence one needs as to why Deb and I feel so fortunate about the three families our daughters are marrying into.

NEXT: Summer showers.

Thomas Kunkel is president of St. Norbert College in De Pere, Wisconsin

I Do, I Do, I Do (Ch. 10)

2010-06-01T04:16:00.000-07:00

The story of four daughters, three couples,

two parents and one very big wedding

By Thomas Kunkel

CHAPTER 10: COMMENCING

Click here for previous chapters: Ch.9 Ch.8 Ch.7 Ch.6 Ch. 5 Ch. 4 Ch. 3 Ch. 2 Ch. 1

June, 2010

May is the season of flowers, mothers, revolutions and—especially around here this year—graduations.

For our crew the commencing, well, commenced at George Washington University, where Nick graduated from the law school a few Saturdays ago. Deb and I weren’t able to be there, as we would have liked—but since the ceremony turned out to be four hours long, perhaps it was just as well. Katie said I would have died. She knows from hard experience that at any confined event, even with my own kids (or my own future in-laws) involved, I start checking my watch about 75 minutes in.

Nonetheless everyone said it was a lovely day, and more to the point we’re all tremendously proud of Nick, who graduated with honors despite taking on the kind of extracurricular burdens (e.g., contributing law journal articles, tackling outside research assignments) that top students tend to do.

Making the day even more memorable for him, Nick’s grandmother wrote a letter reminding him that more than six decades earlier his late grandfather also graduated from GW, and saying how proud he would have been to see Nick crossing the stage. Then she presented Nick with his grandfather’s GW class ring. Not a dry eye in the joint, Katie said.

Deb and I couldn’t attend because that same weekend we were hosting St. Norbert’s commencement activities back in De Pere.

Our graduation speaker was acclaimed journalist, author and political observer Gwen Ifill, host of Washington Week in Review and one of the anchors of The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. Gwen and I are friends from my journalism deanship at the University of Maryland, where she was kind enough to serve on our Board of Visitors. She’s a warm and generous person, and because she likes any good reason to escape Washington she does her fair share of commencement speeches.

And because she’s such a good sport, she complained not a whit about the packed schedule we lined up for her.

Not long after she arrived in Green Bay on a late Saturday afternoon, I picked her up at the campus’ Kress Inn so that she could join us for a casual dinner and conversation at our home with about a dozen St. Norbert students. She held them rapt with the story of how she had moved into journalism after her own graduation from Simmons College in Boston, and progressed through a series of increasingly high-profile newspaper beats into broadcast work. She inquired about the career plans of each student at the table, alternately questioning and advising. She brought the same relaxed engagement to their discussion as she does to Washington Week or the last vice presidential debate. Which is to say she is thoroughly charming.

Then we headed for a reception at the home of our Trustee Ed Thompson, who has a beautiful place on the Fox River big enough to accommodate half of Green Bay—and that’s just about how many people were there, it seemed. Gwen held court in the living room for over an hour as guest after guest, fan after fan came up for an introduction, a quick conversation and a photo.

The party’s other two guests of honor were Ed’s friends Bart and Cherry Starr. Bart is the Hall of Fame quarterback who led the Lombardi-era Packers to five NFL championships, including the first two Super Bowls (and the reason Green Bay came to be known as Titletown). Bart and Cherry, married 56 years, now live in Alabama, but for decades they’ve been heavily involved in various charitable causes in Wisconsin, including helping found the remarkable Rawhide Ranch for wayward boys. They come back to the state often, and St. Norbert College was conferring honorary doctorates on them for their many contributions to the public welfare.

In fact, Bart and Cherry are big fans of Gwen, who in turn knew all about the championship Packers. (I had wondered whether she would and was appropriately chastised for my having doubted it; Gwen knows everything, it turns out.) So they all hit it off like old friends. There were pictures all around, and Gwen would take away a signed Packers mini-helmet as a memento of her Green Bay odyssey.

After a rather cool and damp week, commencement day dawned sunny and mild. The campus looked especially beautiful, as it usually does in mid-May given the season and the hard work of our dedicated grounds crew. Green never came in so many shades, and the sky was that crisp blue of spring, before summer’s humidity arrives to soften it.

Over Sunday brunch I was quite spoiled, with Gwen and Deb to my right and the Starrs to my left. The Starrs talked about their tenure in Green Bay, and how after several desultory years early in Bart’s career their lives changed forever when Coach Lombardi hit town. There was more than a little irony in what I was hearing, I realized. When I came to St. Norbert to interview as a presidential candidate, it was just ahead of the 2008 Super Bowl, and in an open forum with the faculty and staff I’d quoted Bart’s recollection of his introduction to Lombardi, back in 1959. The coach, freshly arrived from his native New York, had called together 15 or so Packer veterans—veterans of losing, mostly—and pointedly told them how he was going to break that habit. His goal for them, Lombardi said, was to chase perfection…knowing they wouldn’t achieve it, but hoping in the pursuit they would reach excellence. Now here was Bart Starr, recounting that same story, as passionately as if it had just happened to him yesterday. It was terribly moving.

But not as moving as when Cherry later remembered the last time they saw Lombardi. This was in 1970, two years after he’d left Green Bay for the Washington Redskins. The phone in the Starrs’ East De Pere home rang one afternoon, Cherry said, and she was surprised to find it was Coach Lombardi calling. He asked how she was, then whether Bart was there. No, but he’ll be back shortly, Cherry said, please come over.

By the time Lombardi arrived Bart had returned, and they showed the coach around their home. Lombardi pronounced it beautiful. Then Cherry said earnestly, “We owe it all to you, Coach. If you hadn’t come to Green Bay, Bart never would have had the success he did, and we would never have been able to live like this. Bart and I talk about it all the time—how we owe it all to you, and we will always be so grateful to you.”

She saw that tears were welling in Lombardi’s eyes. Wordlessly, he gently cradled her neck and gave her a kiss on the cheek. He turned to Bart and hugged him as well. Then he put on his coat and let himself out, still incapable of saying anything.

The next week he died in Washington, of cancer that few knew about until he passed. Cherry said they realized he had come to De Pere to say his goodbyes.

Fueled by such wonderful stories, the day passed in a blur. That afternoon, as we processed into our basketball arena, we were stunned that the place was almost literally packed to the rafters—filled to capacity in the three sides of bleachers, and the floor jammed as well. The combination of a near-record 490 graduates, the glorious day and the draw of Gwen Ifill meant our venerable Schuldes gym was straining to handle an overflow crowd.

Even for commencement, which is always happy, it seemed an unusually joyful day. For one thing, the ceremony moved along at a good clip—no four hours for St. Norbert! For another, the students were all beaming as they crossed the stage to receive their diplomas, especially in about a dozen cases when sons or daughters of St. Norbert faculty or employees joined me onstage to help deliver the diploma (a lovely custom here). It also helped that the student speaker, Patrick Sutherland, was spot-on in his remarks.

And so, too, was the featured speaker, Gwen. As I was seated immediately behind her, I got to watch the graduates spread immediately before her, and they were hanging on every word. Like you want every commencement speaker to be but so few are, she was funny and witty and wise, all at once—and not too long. “No one ever complained about a commencement speech that was too short,” she noted at one point. Thanks again, Gwen.

Several days later, then, Deb and I flew to Maryland for our last bit of commencement business—to see Helen graduate with an art degree from the University of Maryland.

Shortly before we left Wisconsin she had called giddily to say she’d just turned in the final final exam of her UM career. Was ever a student more ready to be liberated from college? For months now she’d been counting down the days. As I’m typing, in fact, she’s standing in the kitchen doing a kind of dance somewhere between a shimmy and a jig. Why so happy, I ask? “Because I’m graduating today!” she says. So, no graduate school? I ask. “Not unless I have to!” she replies, still shimmying. We’ll see.

Helen did extremely well in college, but she never really enjoyed schoolwork the way some of the other girls have. And with the overlay of the wedding, with Mike being so far away and with her own building anticipation, this past semester was a near-eternity for her. But as it always does, eventually, the big day arrived.

Helen skipped the huge university-wide commencement; at Maryland, which has more than 5,000 graduates a year, individual students are recognized in departmental or school-specific graduation ceremonies. On an unusually hot day for May, we were glad to be in the air-conditioned confines of the campus’ student union for the Art Department commencement.

There were maybe 60 students getting their bachelor’s degrees in art, along with a handful of master’s students. The intimate size was nice, in that the faculty emcee, Professor James Thorpe, could say a few words about each of the graduates without anyone feeling the press of time. When it came time to recognize Helen, Professor Thorpe choked up a bit. He talked a bit about her talent, as well as the fact that she had a Navy helicopter pilot in training sending his love her way; and then, caught up in that, he told the audience that in October Helen was getting married to the young ensign in a triple wedding ceremony with two of her sisters! The audience gasped in astonishment, and Jim allowed as how “this is the most amazing thing I’ve ever heard of!”

The extra attention made Helen blush and well up a bit as she crossed the stage, and she gave her prof a big hug. But mostly, I think, it was unalloyed joy at being finished with school.

Afterward we visited at the departmental reception and took some family photographs with Helen in her robe—better proof that a child has actually graduated than any diploma!—then said our goodbyes, as we raced off to BWI to catch a flight back to Green Bay.

With Helen’s commencement over, everyone’s summer plans began to kick in. Nick and Katie actually flew back to Green Bay with Deb and me in order to participate in a pre-wedding couples encounter at the Norbertine Abbey, and shortly they will move into a small apartment in downtown Silver Spring, only a few minutes’ walk from the Metro. The move will cut in half, or more, Katie’s work commute to downtown Washington. Nick is about to take a preparatory course ahead of the Maryland bar exam, which awaits him at the end of July. Then in August he’ll begin a yearlong stint clerking for a justice in Maryland’s Court of Appeals, its highest court.

Claire’s teaching winds up in two weeks, and Sam continues busy with his work at the research lab. Gracie is starting an internship at the Smithsonian Institution with an entomologist, and in the meantime she also landed a nice, 20-hour gig (having to do with insect cataloguing, I believe) at the U.S. Department of Agriculture offices just outside College Park. And way down in Florida, Mike is just weeks away from the end of his training; it won’t be long before all of us find out where he and Helen will be stationed.

But we do know where Helen will be spending the summer—in De Pere, Wisconsin. Her Maryland career done, she is packing up and coming our way very soon.

I don’t know what I will do with that much wedding-planning power united under one roof.

I should also mention that as of a few weeks ago, we sold the house in Burtonsville, Maryland that we bought in 1997. After hanging onto it these past two years, through that s’more-soft real estate market, we felt things had rebounded enough to move forward. After Deb’s earlier trip to oversee the house’s buffing up, we planted the For Sale sign in the front yard…and crossed our fingers. From the start we saw a surprising amount of traffic, and in about three weeks we had a deal. Whew! Maybe we’ll be able to pay for this mega-wedding after all!

But that also means this current short stay is my last one at the house, and I’m a little blue about that. Deb will return in a few weeks to oversee a final clear-out. Various pieces of furniture and keepsakes will go to the girls, and the rest will go toward a yard sale and to Goodwill. And that will be that.

In our long, peripatetic marriage Deb and I have lived in a dozen different homes, most of which we’ve owned. The Burtonsville house, which we moved into in the summer of 1997, was the one we’d occupied longest, more than twice the tenure of any other place. It became as comfortable to us as worn jeans.

I loved its large, three-season porch that overlooked a spacious backyard full of mature trees. That included a tall maple whose trunk, at about ten feet up from the ground, broke into five sturdy branches like a crown—a perfect place for a Dad-built tree house, now a little worse for the wear (as are we all) but still standing watch out there. I loved the quiet neighborhood, not a bad drive into downtown Washington or Baltimore but far enough out to leave the city craziness behind. The warm family room had one wall done entirely in rustic brick, punctuated by a large fireplace and hearth. The main floor had an in-law suite, where Deb’s mother, Norma, lived with us for six years. The master bedroom suite was large and comfortable, and the bath featured a spa-like tub where I spent many happy hours soaking, reading and thinking Big Thoughts. The large basement was mostly finished, a great place for teens to crash. In fact, for most of the time we lived there, usually teens were crashing down there. It was a kind of safe haven for them, which always made Deb and me feel good.

There are memories of the J school’s staff Christmas parties, and every year getting a huge Christmas tree for the front foyer because its two-story height seemed to want one. There are memories of all those proms and Christmas dances, of eager young men coming through the front door…and some of them destined to be fiancés, as it turned out.

Maybe my favorite spot was the porch swing out back. I used to love swinging while listening to the radio, sometimes far into the evening as the lights of the neighborhood gradually came on. It was a great relaxer and got me through more than a few tense patches at work.

On my final day at the house, I spent a few final hours in that swing. It was a beautiful morning, sunny and warm. And for my amusement there was a little drama playing out right in front of me, free of charge. A couple of blue jays were ferociously defending their hatchlings against a sortie party of crows. Their respective strategies were fascinating to watch. The crows sort of nonchalantly strolled the grounds, as if they had nothing more on their minds than simply enjoying a fine spring day, while the much smaller blue jays frenetically zipped back and forth, tree to tree, buzzing the crows and making sure they didn’t get too comfortable in the neighborhood. After he’d had enough of this hectoring, the lead crow took flight and absconded across the yard to the north; the momma blue jay flew right beside him, like a fighter jet escorting a 747 out of restricted airspace.

I guess it’s pretty universal, the impulse to protect one’s nest. Now here we are, breaking up what was ours for more than a decade. Make no mistake; it’s been a joyful trip, being here to witness Helen taking this monumental step in her life. But sitting on the porch swing, knowing it’s for the last time, it feels pretty melancholy, too.

NEXT: The view from the other side.

Thomas Kunkel is president of St. Norbert College in De Pere, Wisconsin.

I Do, I Do, I Do (Ch. 9)

2010-05-01T04:14:00.000-07:00

The story of four daughters, three couples,

two parents and one very big wedding

By Thomas Kunkel

CHAPTER 9: SPRING FEVER

Click here for previous chapters: Ch.8 Ch.7 Ch.6 Ch. 5 Ch. 4 Ch. 3 Ch. 2 Ch. 1

May, 2010

I was in our basement rec room working on my computer when I suddenly had the sensation that someone was looking at me. I glanced up at the casement window that’s at ground level, and sure enough, a plump robin was out there staring right in. In fact, he was staring at me so intently, for a good 30 seconds or more, that I think he may have been trying to tell me something. Like, “Hey, dummy, get your fanny out of the man cave! All the action is out here!”

He was right. It’s been an early and splendidly mild spring in northeastern Wisconsin, and the local wildlife has been busy. Earlier that day I looked out that same window to see a mallard and his lady friend walking side by side, briskly headed down to the river as if Noah himself had just summoned them.

Squirrels chase scratchily on our roof, and down below rabbits bound across the backyard, the wise ones keeping one eye peeled for the eagle who sometimes perches in a tree next door, or the great owl who has a nest in the willow down by our dock. The owl has been mothering two owlets, and with binoculars we’ve been able to watch them grow taller right along with the lengthening days. Whenever we come out the back door, the mom will vacate the nest in a long, graceful swoop over the river to the north, same flight path each time. She is beautiful to behold but not a little intimidating, and frankly one can imagine her swooping away with our little Italian greyhound Sammy were he to venture too close to the tree. So for the past few days when we let him out, we tend to chaperone him, as pathetic as that sounds.

On campus, the native species have awakened as well. The surest sign there of spring’s beckoning? The first sighting of shorts and flip-flops. Of course, the thermometer may only have hit, say, 40 degrees, but for some of the braver, winter-wearier guys (always the guys, never the girls), that’s a veritable heat wave. But before long, everyone seems to be out jogging. You delight in the fact that there is grass where a year ago there was permafrost, and you notice driving home that the baseball team is starting its home games.

In Wisconsin, though, there is one true, universally awaited harbinger of spring: the release of the new Green Bay Packers schedule. An entire state puts its fall and winter calendar on hold until the NFL fills in half of it for us.

And with that development, incidentally, the Triple Wedding essentially went viral.

Here’s the connection. Because the Packer schedule is such a big deal hereabouts, news outlets cover it like it was a congressional declaration of war. But year in and year out, reporters are challenged to find a fresh, unpredictable angle to this most predictable of stories. Impacted most immediately are the area’s hotels, many of which impose premium rates for Packer home weekends. It’s not uncommon for their prices to double, or even triple, and some hotels even make customers reserve rooms for three nights. But the rates can’t be firmed up, of course, until the Great Schedule Release.

Well, because the Kunkels seemed to be in need of half the hotel rooms in Green Bay, we definitely were rooting for it to be an “away” week. And that was as good a media hook as any.

It started with a phone call from Jim Stingl, a popular columnist for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. With the upcoming schedule release as his angle, Jim talked to Deb and me, as well as the girls, and published a lovely article about the wedding in the Sunday paper, accompanied by several photographs of the couples taken by Nick’s sister, Katie.

As is customary these days, the online version of the story solicited comments from readers. Most of these were lovely too, from people charmed by the idea of three sisters and their grooms sharing their special day. One writer was especially perceptive, I thought, when he (it must be a he) wrote: “Congrats to the father if he makes it through all this without being institutionalized.” A small number were the kind of snarky posts that pervade most such comment strings. But the comment that freaked the girls out a bit came courtesy of Your Welcome, who said, referencing a photo of the three girls, “The one on the left is the hottest.” I think that’s when they realized that their wedding officially had moved into a wacky, albeit a tad creepy, domain.

And that might have been that, except a “tip service” apparently picked up Jim’s story and called it to the attention of various news outlets. That very day we were contacted by producers of one of the networks’ morning news shows, who initially wanted to know whether Deb and I and the three couples and Maid of Honor Grace could possibly come to New York—that week—and do a spot on the show. Given our respective schedules and disparate location, that would have been about as simple as mobilizing the National Guard, so we’re instead talking to them about maybe doing it when we all gather for Helen’s graduation.

We got a call from an editor for a national newspaper expressing interest in covering the wedding. Two local stations here in Green Bay did amusing features about the wedding, again pegged to the upcoming release of the Packers’ schedule, and those were also broadcast in Milwaukee. The story turned up on Glamour Brides’ online site. The Green Bay paper did its own story, too.

Maybe the oddest call—or calls, as we heard from not one but two of their producers—came from a reality show, Whose Wedding Is It Anyway? Needless to say, this meant nothing to me, but the girls were familiar with it. They enjoy it for the same reasons most folks do—because the people involved are cast as antagonists, and as the arguments mount you begin to wonder whether there will even be a wedding left to claim. But they were not remotely interested in being battling brides.

All the attention, the fact that the wedding is getting well beyond a family affair, leaves the girls a little conflicted, I think, and understandably so. Themselves products of a media age, they admit to enjoying some of the outside curiosity. At the same time, that attention can be uncomfortable. In an email about the idea of a national television appearance, Helen captured their mixed feelings. “It makes me a little nervous mostly because it’s a lot of attention that I’m not used to, but I think it would be fun,” she wrote. “I guess it’s just weird to me. I mean, I know triple weddings are rare, but I still see it as a wedding—something that happens all the time, not necessarily some big event making national news. If that makes any sense…”

It does. But we also appreciate, in every sense, that a lot of people are fascinated with their story. So everyone agrees we’ll just roll with it and see what happens, even as we try to keep everything in perspective.

In addition to the posts in response to his column, Jim Stingl received a number of emails from readers who were passing along their own experiences with, or memories of, multiple nuptials. Jim was kind enough to share those with us.

One writer told of three brothers from Austria who, a century ago this year, were married in a triple ceremony immediately before setting sail to far-off Milwaukee, Wisconsin. A woman wrote to let Jim know that 39 years ago she and her two sisters were also married in a triple wedding in Park Falls, Wisconsin. Another wrote to relay the story of a Stevens Point, Wisconsin couple who were marrying off three daughters within the calendar year.

But the most remarkable tale was about three sisters from rural Wisconsin who married three brothers. (How about that for an episode of Whose Wedding Is It Anyway?!!) This occurred in 1938. The last of the six passed away in 2008.

In a way it’s kind of sweet knowing that, while a triple wedding is rare indeed, it does happen more often than any of us realized. Maybe we’re not the oddities we thought!

Oh, yes. The Packers schedule did finally come out, and there was much jubilation. It turns out that on wedding weekend the Packers are playing out of town. Ironically, they are headed to Washington, even as all my daughters, two of my sons-in-law-to-be and a small army of their friends are headed to Green Bay. Maybe they can all wave to one another somewhere over Akron.

Amid all this, the more serious business of wedding planning was picking up again. For instance, it was fascinating to watch a three-day flurry of activity surrounding the coming-together of the wedding invitations. You would think that would be a pretty straightforward project, but you would be wrong.

For starters, an “invitation” is not just one card but a full portfolio of elements—envelopes, the actual invitation card, the RSVP card, an information card with hotel rooms, and so forth. Helen, bridal planner extraordinaire and budding graphic designer, logically enough was handling this herself.

Instead of a traditional design (e.g., calligraphy-styled typography on cream-colored heavy stock), Helen’s design is contemporary and deceptively simple. It features three yellow flowers, with an accent border across the top of navy blue. The look is appropriately elegant yet fresh.

The interesting thing to watch, though, was the seemingly endless vetting process and all the backing and forthing—between Helen and Deb, between Deb and me, between Helen and me, between Helen and her sisters, between Deb and the grooms’ families, between Deb and my colleague Amy. When other people’s wedding invitations hit your mailbox, you certainly never think of all the blood, sweat and possibly even tears that went into them, but I will never look at one quite the same way again.

Take that extraneous third L out of “College.” Make those flowers a little lighter so the superimposed type is easier to read. Make the babysitting service complimentary instead of complementary. Doesn’t “honour” instead of “honor” sound effete? Take the “th” off October 9^th. Add ZIP codes to those hotel addresses. How do the grooms’ parents want their names presented? Honestly, you’d have thought we were proofreading the invitations for the Obamas’ next state dinner.

But as every wedding planner knows, the devil is in the details, and after all this virtual confabbing the final product, I have to say, is marvelous. Helen has a future, no doubt about it.

Incidentally, the invitations will be printed locally—more stimulus for the Green Bay economy. Deb says about everything in the wedding is being bought or provided locally except the linens, and she says the linens aren’t available locally. On the other hand, a horse-drawn carriage is available locally. I know, because the guy just called me, unbidden, to let me know.

If you’ve been following my account, you know I haven’t exactly been in the middle of the wedding planning. Not long ago, however, Helen did ask me to help with the shaping of the ceremony itself, especially as to the music they select. I was flattered, certainly, but at the same time the pressure was on!

It will be a Catholic service, but not a Mass. Though the framework is still taking shape, we know it will have many familiar liturgical rituals, such as several Biblical readings, a Responsorial Psalm and Prayers of the Faithful. But with three nuptials to be administered, the ceremony will be long enough as it is without the incorporation of a full-blown Mass.

It all kicks off, of course, with the procession. At the moment—all this is subject to change, so make sure to buy a program—Dad will escort Katie in first, then Claire, then Helen. Helen suggested that each of the girls and their retinues should have a different fanfare but that somehow they should be related for a sense of continuity. I have suggested Henry Purcell’s “Trumpet Voluntary,” followed by “Trumpet Tune” by Jeremiah Clarke and Daniel Purcell, followed by “Prelude to Te Deum” by Marc-Antoine Charpentier. The three fanfares might be played by actual trumpets, which I proposed for the clarion drama, though Helen may be leaning toward using violin versions for the subtlety. Like everyone else, I will probably find out when I walk down the aisle.

The girls are not huge fans of solo numbers, or music for music’s sake. They want any music in the service to be connected to some accompanying activity. We are thinking of asking five or six of St. Norbert’s very talented student singers to form a kind of mini-chorus, but that idea, much less what they might sing, is still evolving.

Anyway, when they get down to business, each priest will deliver a short homily about his couple, then preside over that couple’s exchange of vows. That will happen consecutively rather than have all three be done together. This format will reinforce the idea that each couple within the triple must have “their” special moment. Besides, we don’t want the nuptials to come off like one of Reverend Moon’s bulk-wedding spectacles.

After the exchange of vows, I thought they might want to incorporate a six-way candle-lighting ceremony—if the fire marshal will let us, with that many lighted tapers being waved around. I also suggested it could be accompanied by the ethereal “Flower Duet” from Lakme. But Helen responded, “The ‘Flower Duet’ doesn’t sound like an easy song to sing, plus it reminds me of a Godiva commercial.” I take that as a no. Plus, they apparently hate the candle-lighting idea. I feel my commission slipping….

Anyway, when everybody’s all married up good and official, the couples will recess in the same order they came in. My suggestion for the music there was Jean-Joseph Mouret’s “Rondeau,” but Helen says, um, probably not. “I want something with a little more excitement,” she said. “I think this song is a tad blah. Hope I wasn’t too mean.” Not at all, Helen—and don’t get up, I can let myself out. (But you’ll still get my bill.)

So who knows what the heck kind of music will be playing at this wedding. Regardless, the recessional order will put Helen and Mike out the door last, which will accommodate that Navy sword arch that Mike’s fellow officers will be forming up.

And then, incredibly, Deb and I will have three married daughters and three new sons.

My last journal began with the sports report. This one concludes with it.

On the last Sunday of April I had the opportunity to throw out the ceremonial first pitch at the Milwaukee Brewers game at beautiful Miller Park. St. Norbert College was part of an event there with other Wisconsin private schools, and the first pitch came with the deal.

I had two goals: Keep my manhood (translation: don’t bounce the ball to the plate); and don’t wind up on that night’s SportsCenter. Had the latter happened, that would have meant something had gone very, very wrong.

After the lovely, largely dry spring I was celebrating at the top of this installment, game day dawned cold and windy, with heavy showers. In truth, the rain was badly needed, but the timing was terrible. If the team had been playing in their old park, this raw day would have been a rainout for sure. But the Brewers (and the taxpayers of Greater Milwaukee) were thoughtful enough to build Miller Park with a fancy retractable dome, so their game against the Chicago Cubs went off as planned.

About 25 minutes before the game I went down to the Brewers dugout, where a team official met me and explained the drill. There actually would be three people throwing out ceremonial first pitches, which I learned is not uncommon. I had plenty of time to survey the crowd, which appeared to be at least half Cubs fans. The Cubs are division rivals whose own ballpark is just 60 miles away. No wonder some refer to Miller Park as “Wrigley North.”

The team official gave me my ball ahead of time. That was good, as I could rub it with my increasingly sweaty palms.

A young lady went first. From in front of the mound she tossed in a perfectly respectable lob. Second was a young man who marched right out and confidently threw a nice pitch letter-high.

My turn. As they announced my name and St. Norbert affiliation, I headed to the mound—careful, of course, to avoid the freshly chalked first base line so as not to jinx the home team. It’s not a far walk—unless you are making it in front of nearly 40,000 people. Under those circumstances it’s less a walk than an out-of-body experience. Still, I did remember to turn and wave to my St. Norbert friends watching up in the “Dew Deck” high above right field.

Only when I reached the pitching rubber did I turn to home, where I saw Brewers catcher George Kottaras crouched behind the plate. Intellectually, I understood that he was only 60 feet six inches away from me—so why did it seem more like 500 yards? After a decade of playing organized baseball and a few weeks of practice, suddenly I wasn’t sure I could get the ball that far with a catapult!

A little blood rushed away from my brain, but before I could get even more nervous I told myself, “You’ve done this a million times, just throw it.” Which I did.

If there’d been a lefty at bat I’d have hit him. Still, under the circumstances my pitch got the job done—it was about knee high and George caught it just fine, with no lunging or extraneous effort. He shook my hand and gave me the ball, which he then signed.

When I got back up to the Dew Deck, Deb told me I had done fine. But after a moment, she noted that I seemed to take a long time to get to the mound. “You could have put a little more skip in your step,” she said, helpfully.

I explained to her that I took so long to get to the mound because as I walked my legs were turning to concrete. Besides, if I’d actually skipped out to the mound, I’d have wound up on SportsCenter for sure.

NEXT: Commencing

Thomas Kunkel is president of St. Norbert College in De Pere, Wisconsin.

I Do, I Do, I Do (Ch. 8)

2010-04-01T19:52:00.000-07:00

The story of four daughters, three couples,

two parents and one very big wedding

By Thomas Kunkel

CHAPTER 8: THE WAITING (PART 2)

Click here for previous chapters: Ch.7 Ch.6 Ch. 5 Ch. 4 Ch. 3 Ch. 2 Ch. 1

April, 2010

Enough wedding news for a while; time for the sports report.

I pulled out my iPhone and called my cousin Bob back in Indiana. “Well,” I said, “I’m standing right on the spot where Herb Brooks orchestrated the ‘Miracle on Ice’ back in 1980.”

“No!” he said.

“Yup. Right here on that spot at the end of the bench where, when they won and the place went crazy, he just slid out the side and headed back into the locker room. Very cool. There are some nice perks to this job.”

“Yeah,” he said, “and you get paid for it.”

“Get paid handsomely for it,” I added helpfully. (I try never to forget how much Bob likes to live vicariously through me….)

I was spending a few days at the Olympic Hockey Center in scenic Lake Placid, N.Y., because the St. Norbert Green Knights were back in the “Frozen Four”—the Division III national hockey championships. If you’re of a certain age, you surely remember watching a bunch of upstart, collegiate Americans shocking a veteran Soviet team, not to mention the rest of the world, in the most politically charged sporting event in history. Hard to believe it’s been 30 years now—none of our four daughters was even a gleam in Dad’s eye yet!

St. Norbert’s hockey team has produced some miracles of its own under talented head coach Tim Coghlin. It’s been to the championship round five times in the last six years, and two years ago, right here at the Herb Brooks rink, St. Norbert won the national title.

Our semifinal game, against fast-skating Oswego State, was a full-out thriller. The momentum seesawed all game long—we scored first, they tied it up; we scored a second time, they tied it up; we went up 3-2, but they tied it up again. Then with just 39 seconds left to play, St. Norbert freshman Cody Keefer picked the puck from an Oswego defenseman at their blue line, streaked to the goal on a short breakaway and buried a shot in the net! Victory! I had to check to see if my middle-aged heart was still functioning.

Dramatic as that was, it was just the appetizer for the next evening’s championship game.

Norwich University, in neighboring Vermont, was the top-ranked team in the nation and featured yet another bunch of superb, offense-minded skaters. But what unfolded was a defensive epic. Three regulation periods found the score tied at just 1-1, so we went into overtime—not your usual weenie five-minute overtime, mind you, but a full 20-minute period. Or until someone scores. The NCAA euphemistically terms this “sudden victory,” but everyone in the arena appreciated it for what it really was: sudden death.

By this point both teams were markedly fatigued. Just mounting a coherent attack on a change of possession became a challenge. Still, St. Norbert had its opportunities, producing several flurries right in front of the Norwich net, but their goaltender was having none of it.

Thus it went into an exhausting fifth period. It seemed the winner would be the last team standing—maybe literally so. And by now Norwich was taking it to us. Somehow, though, our all-American goalie, B.J. O’Brien, was seeing every move and killing every shot; he was making more stops than a cop at a Friday night checkpoint. As the clock slid into the final minute, the crowd began readying itself for an unheard-of third overtime—or what would have been, had it been a football game, a seventh quarter.

But then, with a mere 31 seconds left, Norwich player Pier-Oliver Cotnoir fired a shot from close range. B.J. blocked it, but the rebound came right back to Cotnoir and he slid in the followup.

And just like that it was over.

Norwich was the champion, and deservedly so. But St. Norbert had skated like champions as well, playing a great team to a veritable dead heat in what, at almost 100 minutes played, was the longest DIII tournament game in history.

And in what was arguably an even more incredible record, B.J. O’Brien had 70 saves—yes, that’s not a typo, I said 70—in the game. For many goalies, that would be a good season. Even though it was ultimately in a losing cause, B.J.’s performance was so stunning that he was named the tournament’s most valuable player.

Surely disappointed, the Green Knights were mostly exhausted. It was all they could do to stand there for 15 minutes after the game’s end, on legs wobbly from fatigue, to get their medals. Yet they were proud, too, of the incredible run they’d had. They’d lost a number of key players from last year’s team, and no one expected them to have a championship-caliber season. Yet they won their conference, won the league’s Peters Cup postseason tournament, finished the regular season ranked third in the nation, and wound up playing for the national title. Not bad.

The next afternoon, as the team bus pulled up to our home rink, I told the young men how proud I was of what they’d accomplished, and that it had been a privilege to watch them compete. As they stepped off the bus I shook the hands of each player.

Imagine, a double-overtime championship game—nearly as rare as a triple wedding!

Deb skipped Lake Placid, though not really by choice. She was back in Maryland that entire week, working herself to a frazzle.

We’d recently decided it was time to put our Maryland home up for sale, so Deb was back there doing the millions of things people do when they’re getting ready to turn their house over to perfect strangers. She was meeting with painters and plumbers and carpet guys and tile grouters and deck cleaners and floor refinishers. As she phoned in her daily updates, I got the feeling we were reconstructing the whole damn house, one contractor at a time.

Her to-do list was more ample than her time, so she started each morning around 7 and typically wasn’t done till 10 at night, sometimes later. I felt a little guilty—but just a little. For one thing, there’s no one better suited to this kind of project. And anyway, she secretly loves it. It’s worth the price of admission to see this woman interact with contractors. She somehow strikes that perfect balance between sweet and salty that causes contractors (virtually all men, of course) to want to get things done for her. It’s a little awe-inspiring, if you want to know the truth.

She got to spend some time with the girls, although not much as she might have liked. They were all plenty preoccupied with work and classes. But it hardly mattered anyway; she had moved into full “Big Deb” mode, a state of laser-like, manic determination, usually fueled by equal parts anxiety and coffee. You can always tell, because you’ll be talking to her and suddenly you realize she’s not hearing you. She’s moved on.

Meantime, I was catching up myself with Claire, and in the process she shed a little more light on how, in the wake of the three engagements last summer, the idea of the triple wedding emerged.

You’ll recall that when she and Sam first were engaged, they were thinking about a July wedding back in Evansville, Sam’s home and where Claire has lots of family. But even with a location secured and other ideas in mind, Claire said, “We were already stressing out about all the contacts we would have to make for rentals, decor, music, photography, ceremony, reception and so on.” In fact, Claire admitted that, while she was definitely thrilled to be getting married, she increasingly found herself dreading all the logistical details.

Katie returned from her vacation engaged to Nick, and for the first time as fiancées the three sisters were comparing notes. Helen shared her creative ideas about a fall wedding in Wisconsin. Claire explained where she and Sam stood on things, and Katie allowed that, at that early point, she and Nick had no ideas whatsoever.

And it was at that moment, Claire said, that Katie blurted out—as Claire described it, “In the same tone of voice that she used to get a Disney vacation for us from Mom”—something to the effect, Wouldn’t it be funny to have a triple wedding? Almost as soon as she said it, Claire added, Katie started backtracking. “Obviously this could never work, but what if….”

Claire resonated to the idea immediately. After all, the sisters had shared literally every aspect of their lives to that point, from bedrooms and clothes to vacations and friends—why not a wedding? “But I figured there was no way Helen would want to do that,” Claire explained. “She was the only one who had solid wedding plans, and she wouldn’t want to spend her and Mike’s day with four other people!”

Helen, though, surprised them. “Yeah, that would be cool,” she said. Claire and Katie both looked at their sister in something like shock. But it turned out that Helen had already thought about the possibility. For one thing, it would be the best way to ensure that as many of their friends and family as possible would see the beautiful wedding she was planning; if there were three separate weddings in three separate locales, that would hardly be a given.

Indeed, Claire said, “we realized that a triple wedding was the only way to ensure we would all care about each other’s weddings equally, that we would have the same number of family and friends attending, that the grooms would all have family supporting one another. There could be no jealousy over who had the better wedding, cake, dress, bridesmaid’s dresses, ceremony, first dance, toasts, etc., because we would all share the same event. The more I think about it, the more it truly seemed destined.”

All that remained was to persuade the other parties. But some of us learned long ago that once the Kunkel girls have their collective minds set on something, it’s likely to happen.

So for now, the countdown continues. Fortunately, all of the kids have plenty to preoccupy them, which helps the time pass. I asked each of them how they’re handling the interregnum, what sorts of things they think about.

For her part, Claire said, “I went from stressing over planning a wedding to waking up every day and looking forward to a life-changing event. In one day I will gain two brothers-in- law, guys I truly look forward to calling family, who also come from great families. And my little sister will be celebrated as the best maid of honor ever.

“It’s hard to grasp that this event is actually happening,” she continued, “but every once in a while Sam and I take a break from work and stress and dream about our big day.”

Sam concurred. The very, very long winter they’d just experienced didn’t make the wait any easier, he said, having to “hunker down mentally and physically just trying to go day by day.” Negotiating several feet of snow just to get to work sort of pushed all other considerations to the margins for a while. But he said with spring’s arrival and the chance to resume something of a normal existence, he and Claire find themselves talking more about their plans—both for the wedding and beyond.

So now his excitement level is high again, he said. “The hamster wheel is turning again,” he added—a phrase I intend to borrow once in a while.

Helen, who was just back from a short visit to see Mike in Florida, is mostly intent on getting through her final semester at Maryland. Fortunately, she’s in the middle of a wonderful internship at Discovery Communications, which has taught her a lot about commercial graphic design and Web communication.

As for the wedding, she said, “little things pop up in my head from time to time that I need to do, like choose the readings or invitations. I love it when people ask me about my wedding, especially when I’m in school. It gives me a moment of happiness no matter how stressed out I am from schoolwork. Sometimes I think about the summer and the timeline of how things are going to go. When to fly where, when to drive where, getting a car, bridal showers, dress fittings, me-and-Mom time, Sammy time, family time, future in-law time, finding somewhere to live with Mike, etc. The waiting part is hard, but time is flying.”

Speaking of flying, Mike is in the middle of a challenging training passage to get his instrument rating for helicopters. When he does get to think about the wedding, he said, his most pressing worry is whether he’ll get sufficient leave for a decent honeymoon. “Most guys I knew who were getting married got leave from Thursday through maybe Monday, which is not a lot of time,” he said. “I'm hoping they will be a little more open to me taking maybe a week so Helen and I could possibly go on a trip after. That would be nice—but as with anything in the Navy, you never know when and where you are going to be until you are there.

“To be honest, I think about the wedding not so much as I think about the life Helen and I will share afterward. That is something I think about every day, particularly when I talk to her on the phone. I am excited about the wedding, excited to introduce my family to my friends, my family to your family. Most of all I am excited to have that first dance with Helen—and like you, I really want to try and have a ‘dance’ rather than just the high school slow-dance shuffle.”

Grace told me she thinks about the wedding every day. Mostly that’s from anticipation, but not a little apprehension. As the maid of honor, she wants to be sure the July 3 shower back in Indiana goes well. She’s also worried about her toast. “I still haven’t figured out if I want to write three separate toasts or address my sisters as a whole,” she said. But she’s afraid that whatever she writes, whether one speech or three, whether straight or funny, she likely won’t be able to get through the delivery without turning into a blubbering mess. I suspect she’s right.

Finally, I checked in with the burgeoning law firm of Kunkel and Stewart. Nick’s final semester in law school is racing to a close, and the pressure is on. “With a marriage in the offing, it could’ve been one of the most formidable [semesters] of my educational career,” he said. “But with the help of so many different hands and minds, it’s been an amazingly smooth process—from Sam's input on tuxes to Grace’s letter-writing, as well as your blogging. In particular, though, I have to single out Helen and Deb, who’ve done a tremendous amount of thinking and planning. For that, I’ll always be appreciative.

“I’m not sure what Katie’s going to say, but we’ve often remarked to one another that it’s about time we’re married. Even though we haven’t been dating for years and years, we’ve been so close for so long that marriage is just a natural sign of how we feel. So I think anticipation is the right word for it—it’s not just excitement and nerves about the actual day, but also restlessness to get started. It’s about time!”

Katie, who’s been settling into her labor-law job, basically agreed. “I’m a little nervous, mostly because it’s going to be such a big production,” she said. “I’m not nervous at all about marrying Nick. I wish we could get married tomorrow.

“I also feel very lucky to have Helen planning the wedding. Some of my friends have gotten married or are getting married, and they want to discuss wedding details with me. Thank goodness Helen took the helm there because she’ll do a much better job than I ever could. I don’t even want to do the few things that Helen can’t do for me, like the bridal registry.

“I think about the wedding a lot. I think it’s bringing the four sisters even closer together. I’ve also been trying to plan where Nick and I should go for our honeymoon. I still haven’t narrowed our options down much, probably because I like imagining us traveling to any number of places. Anyway, I try not to think about the wedding. I get too excited when I really think about it, and it’s still seven months away.”

All sorts of people remain sweetly fascinated with the wedding. Not long ago our St. Norbert Magazine focused on the theme of love, in all its incarnations. My column at the front of the magazine referenced the triple wedding.

Soon after, I got an e-mail from Connie and Rich Gluth, St. Norbert alumni who have more than a little sympathy for Deb and me. This past summer, two of their daughters were married a mere 90 days apart—one in June, one in September. And a third daughter was married just three years ago! As they put it: “Three girls in braces, three girls to prom, three girls in college, three girls in wedding dresses….”

The court happily accepts the Gluths as expert witnesses.

Anyway, Rich composed the following for my benefit:

Top 10 reasons to just agree to your three daughters’ wedding plans:

10. Most answers will be wrong anyway, so just nod quietly and ask where the Tylenol is.

9. Most of the guests at the wedding will still be wondering how you are paying for it, so what the heck—what’re a few swans going to cost?

8. You could be flying everyone to Ireland for a castle wedding and a private ceremony.

7. For the record, wearing one tuxedo and uncomfortable rental shiny shoes is much easier than wearing three goofy monkey suits and three pairs of uncomfortable rental shoes.

6. Since your credit cards are already maxed out, make sure every guest gets a signed check from you as a “thank you” for coming.

5. You will have to make a toast (or two or three) as the father of the bride; don’t start out with the words “on the day they were born” or your guests will all head straight for the bar.

4. Planning anything else in your life or career will be a walk in the park.

3. Your family will never ever ask you to host any holidays or family reunions—or even make a baloney sandwich.

2. Agreeing will give you more time to smile, reflect, and pray about the madness that everyone else will be experiencing. You can enjoy the commotion and chaos while concentrated on pouring a cold one.

And the No. 1 reason to just agree to everything your girls want for their weddings: As a dad, you will love the peace and joy of knowing you gave them memories that will stay with them forever, gave them the best day of their lives.

“Enjoy these days,” Rich added, “they are truly blessings.”

Spoken like a man who knows what he’s talking about.

NEXT: Spring fever.

Thomas Kunkel is president of St. Norbert College in De Pere, Wisconsin.

I Do, I Do, I Do (Ch. 7)

2010-03-01T17:06:00.000-08:00

The story of four daughters, three couples,

two parents and one very big wedding

By Thomas Kunkel

CHAPTER 7: THE ANNIVERSARY

Click here for previous chapters: Ch.6 Ch. 5 Ch. 4 Ch. 3 Ch. 2 Ch. 1

March, 2010

Sam and Claire flew in for a long weekend, which for us was a welcome break indeed from the nearly nonstop school calendar at this time of the semester. They needed to set aside a day for a “couples encounter” program that is required of all men and women who marry in the Catholic Church, and they decided to attend one here in Wisconsin. It’s just possible Claire also wanted an excuse to visit her bridal gown, which she did and which I was again assured (by those in the know) is beautiful.

While here the kids also caught up with Fr. Sal Cuccia, associate pastor of our Old St. Joe’s Church, who will be presiding over their third of the wedding. Sal, a bit of a liturgical maestro, has taken on the complicated choreography of the ceremony itself, so he and Sam and Claire batted around a few ideas about the best way to handle one of the trickier parts, the tri-processional. Later that evening Sam started to explain to us what he understood the marching order would be, but Claire corrected him, although it didn’t seem she was altogether sure either. Ultimately I had no clearer idea what that will look like than I had before.

No matter. On the afternoon of the wedding I will be report to my station at the appointed time, and I will march where I am told.

That Sunday Deb and I marked our 34^th wedding anniversary. After a midmorning Mass at Old St. Joe we went out for a leisurely brunch, Sal joining us. I tried to trick Claire into telling me a little bit about her bridal gown, but she wouldn’t rise to the bait. (She did show me her shoes, though; they are heels in a lovely, silvery, satiny fabric.) Claire talked about another couple that had attended the encounter program. The groom-to-be whined so obnoxiously all morning about having to be there that everyone around him began to hope that his fiancée, for her own sake, would think better of the engagement. Perhaps she was getting an “encounter” with reality.

Before church that morning I gave Deb an anniversary card and a gift certificate to a local day spa. I had gone by a few mornings before to pick it up, and as I parked my car and headed for the entrance I could begin to detect the aroma of lavender and some new-agey flute music halfway across the parking lot. I nearly broke out in hives. I knew she’d love it.

For her part, Deb gave me a thankful peck on the cheek and…bupkis! I feigned chagrin, but she hadn’t forgotten. Over the years we have become pretty laid back about gifts and the like for birthdays and anniversaries, essentially because we’ve been so fortunate in our lives that we don’t really lack for any material things. For us, it really is the thought that matters. Needless to say, she never forgets. And as long as I remember—not always a sure thing when I was a younger husband, alas—we are copasetic.

We also shared some stories about our own wedding that chilly Saturday in the late winter of 1976.

At the time we were just twenty, both students at the University of Evansville. On top of school I was working nights as a reporter for the Evansville Courier, and Deb was working days at the university, in the office of continuing education. Back then UE was on the quarter system, and there was to be a one-week break toward the end of February between the winter and spring terms. February 21 was a Saturday; by coincidence it was also the anniversary of the day some years earlier when I’d asked her to go steady. It was clearly karma.

The week before had been, shall we say, eventful. I don’t know exactly when bachelor’s parties moved from the night before a wedding to, more typically, the weekend before, but that was a good call. With a week between the party and the wedding, you can be as nutty and uninhibited as you want and still have time to recover, be that financially, physically, emotionally, or all three. A week can buy you a lot of forgiveness.

My friends—many of whom at the time were, like me, UE students—had come together to throw me a bachelor’s party. As most of us went back years, they knew basically everything there was to know about me, including the germane fact that I was not good about holding my beer. This point they exploited to great advantage. Of course, had I known that three decades later I would become a college president, I doubtless would have put up more of a fight that evening, but as it was events devolved fairly quickly, not to mention untidily. Many embarrassing things were said, and done, including by the guest of honor. Indeed, after several hours of this I couldn’t take it anymore and decided it would be best if I just left.

Yes, I snuck out of my own bachelor’s party. I headed back to the modest little frame house on Spring Street that the bride-to-be and I had just purchased to start our married life (she was not resident yet), stripped to my underwear, plopped onto my bed and instantly fell into a coma-like sleep.

Now, I believe Emily Post is silent on the etiquette of absconding from your own party, but she couldn’t possibly approve. At some later point in the evening my inebriated pals realized the guest of honor had slipped away. They decided this affront, naturally, required redress. In truth, they were a motley bunch. Even then I knew that a number of them had much promise, and in fact many of them would go on to be quite successful in business and in life. But others of them—well, Mensa material they weren’t. One was a sad sack who once tried to rake in a poker pot proclaiming that king-ace-two-three-four constituted an “around-the-corner straight.” Another was the guy who, on a different boozy evening, proved to us definitively that methane gas when lit produces a beautiful blue flame, regardless its, um, source. Yet another was maybe eighteen at the time and was dating a woman over forty—although “dating” is probably not the mot juste to characterize that particular relationship. But no matter how much or little they were given to work with when they were put on this earth, they were all my friends, and when they realized I’d slipped away they went on a mission to right a wrong.

When they got to my house they first looked around the garage. I suppose they were looking for a key; what they found instead was a can of gold spray paint, and this would prove to be all the inspiration they needed. They proceeded to break in through the back door, searched the house—and I can say it doesn’t take long to search a four-room, 750-square-foot house—and flipped on the bedroom light to locate their man, sprawled before them like a corpse who’d had his burial suit stolen.

Eventually I became faintly aware of a hissing sound, and my eyes slowly opened to the gauzy sight of the twelve of them, beers in hand, encircling the bed like a group of pasty apostles. Slowly I caught on to the fact that one of their number was spraying paint on my leg. The others were urging him onward, and northward, and they hooted as they admired their handiwork.

When I was sufficiently gilded that I resembled a life-size Oscar statue, they applied the coup de grace. They led me away to a nearby lake and tossed me in. I don’t recall whose brilliant idea that was. Maybe they thought they were doing me a favor; after all, latex paint does clean up with water. On the other hand, it was February, and the water was freezing, almost literally. I would go on to spend the rest of the night drying out in my underwear, wrapped only in a heavy blanket, in one of those mobile homes that don’t move, trying to figure out what the hell had just happened.

After that excitement, the remainder of the wedding countdown marched right along. But as our anticipation heightened, the weather forecast worsened. Evansville, in the Ohio River Valley, is along a latitude where late February can be like Antarctica or it can be like June or it can be anywhere in between. As Saturday dawned, it was still winter in Evansville, and the afternoon promised an unpleasant mix of rain, sleet and snow. Mother Nature would not be doing us any favors.

Around midmorning I took a bath and prepared to shave. I looked for a long time in the mirror, the way every man has done on his wedding day since the invention of marriage, or at least the invention of mirrors. I was ready for this step—wasn’t I? Well…yes. Yes, I was. I was excited, in fact. I loved her, unquestionably. And hadn’t we been waiting for this day for years?

And at that very moment I had an inspiration.

For two years Deb had kvetched about the mustache I had worn since graduating from high school. How it was cheesy. How it looked like an overgrown caterpillar, or an undergrown otter, or worse. Now, one of the cool things about the Seventies is that any hair was great. Didn’t matter if you were talking about top-of-the-head hair, facial hair or even chest hair. (People’s Exhibit A: Burt Reynolds’ centerfold in Cosmo, 1972.) The more hair you had, the better, and I subscribed to this hirsute philosophy fully.

Still, I couldn’t deny it: The woman I loved reviled the mustache, hated it like Hamilton hated Burr, like e.e. cummings hated the “caps lock” key on his typewriter.

So as I gazed into the mirror that morning, I made a bold decision. I’ll do her a favor, I told myself. For her wedding day, I’ll shave it off.

And I did. Ten minutes with a dull scissors and a Gillette disposable razor and my upper lip saw daylight for the first time since 1974.

I was feeling great; despite the weather it was a good day to get married. I got into the rented tux and headed over to the beautiful stone chapel at the university. One by one my boys were collecting in the sacristy. Just a week before they’d been like feral animals, conducting a Krylon bacchanalia and nearly killing me from a combination of alcohol poisoning and hypothermia. Now here they were, grooms and ushers, all cleaned up and looking like they had just stepped out of the pages of GQ (well, the Midwestern edition, anyway).

Outside it was sleeting a bit, but the sidewalks were mostly just wet, so that would be more of an inconvenience than a danger to our grandparents and older guests. The presider, Fr. Kenneth Herr, whom I had known since elementary school, was there and ready to go. I was feeling a little nervous, of course, less about the impending ceremony than the idea of driving that night down to Nashville, on the first short leg of our honeymoon trip, in a wintry mix. But mostly I was happy—and even a little proud of myself for the state of my composure. All was good to go. Nothing could go wrong…right?

Looking back through the considerable fog of thirty-four years, I frankly cannot recall what particular errand was so important that it sent me to the foyer of the church at that particular moment. I do remember that it was early enough, maybe half an hour before the ceremony, that no one other than stray members of the wedding party was in the sanctuary itself. But just as I got to the foyer, who do I spot coming up the stairs, from the basement dressing area, but my soon-to-be-bride? Our eyes met across those thirty or so feet. I didn’t say anything, but she let out a shriek. “What are you doing back here!?” she yelped—then in a flash turned back down the stairs as abruptly as a prairie dog ducking back into its hole.

Well, this was not good—not good at all, I thought. I mean, the groom seeing his bride before the wedding, you might as well get a voodoo woman to put a triple hex on your entire miserable married life! Of course she was upset! I was upset too!

Yet in the next instant it occurred to me that there was something in that shriek that suggested it might have been about more than just a lifetime jinx. Could it be that she was not happy about…the missing mustache?

I went back into the sanctuary, and soon enough the church filled, the music began, and we all took our places. And then there she was—again—floating down the aisle on her father’s arm. She was beautiful, wearing a traditionally styled wedding dress, with sleeves, a lovely lacework collar and a full veil. Her dad handed her over to me, with what I momentarily took to be a skeptical look in my direction, but I’m sure it was just my imagination. Then again, maybe he didn’t recognize me.

A few moments later, during one of the readings, Deb leaned over and whispered: “How could you shave your mustache?”

“I thought you hated it.”

“I do hate it!”

“So I thought I was doing you a favor!”

“I don’t care! Don’t you know you’re never supposed to surprise a bride on her wedding day!”

So there it was. She would later contend that she was so upset upon seeing me in the front of the church because she knew that I would immediately grow the mustache back, and that all our wedding photos would have her marrying some strange man that no one recognized. As it happens, she was right—I did immediately grow the mustache back and proudly sported it for the next five years. Of course, what she didn’t realize at the time was that after your first year or so of marriage, no one ever cracks open their wedding album. By law it is to remain sealed until your kids are thirteen or fourteen and they discover it to fuel their unending amusement. And frankly, it’s just as well. Looking at most wedding photos from the mid-Seventies today brings to mind nothing so much as a Flava Flav party.

The rest of the wedding passed in a blur. I thought I was being very cool, but I was later informed that every time I spoke during our exchange of vows I was extravagantly shaking Deb’s hand like it was a pump handle. Suave.

I was happy. And yet…it was eating at me that my bright idea, my mustache inspiration, had backfired so badly.

Later, however, at the reception, I would extract a small measure of payback.

Deb had insisted that it was a custom in her family (and at their Protestant beerless wedding receptions) that aunts and some of the older women guests would sit around the gift table while the bride and groom opened a sampling of their presents. In my family’s frothier Catholic receptions I had never seen or heard of such a thing. This was a silly idea, I said, and what’s worse, it could be a bad one. You never know what could go wrong.

What on earth could go wrong opening wedding presents? she’d replied.

Hello? Do you not remember my friends? I said, maybe even flashing a bit of my wrist that still had flecks of gold on it.

Well, of course we opened some presents, with fifteen or twenty of her matronly relatives nodding their approval with each gift.

Until Deb picked up what would be the last one. It was about the size of a shirt box, but maybe a little bigger. It could have been anything. But as she ripped away the wrapping paper, its true identify was instantly revealed for all to admire.

It was an “Around the World in Bed” game. The box cover was helpfully illustrated with a naked and fairly athletic couple enjoying one another’s company. Inside was the game board (Monopoly never looked like this), some dice, a candle, God knows what all. It was a gift from my friend Scott, whom I saw was now suddenly standing behind Deb’s confused Grandmother Wathen, grinning like the Cheshire cat.

A low murmur of horror went through our little audience.

I looked at Deb. “Told you so,” I said, uttering a sentence we would both employ any number of times over the next thirty-four years.

NEXT: The Waiting (Part 2)

Thomas Kunkel is president of St. Norbert College in De Pere, Wisconsin.