Several months back I wrote a piece for a magazine called “The Urban Hiker” that’s published down here in the Triangle, and after submitting it found out from the editor that because the publication had fallen on tough financial times, there weren’t going to be any issues for a while. This was too bad because you could find some really great first-person stories in there, and I hope they are able to rebound.

Recently I was contacted by a Catholic magazine down here to do a short piece on the “Vocation of Marriage.” I decided to dig up this old piece, which never was published, and which, I realized, I never even showed to anyone. So I’ve decided to post it here.

Just so you know, even though I sometimes write stuff like this that is slightly more serious than what I normally write, don’t get any big ideas that J and I are going to swoon all over each other during that first dance at the wedding. I hate that stuff.

Here’s what I wrote…

Justin is sitting on the ledge of the wooden deck at the house we currently rent, a Saranac Mountain Ale by his side. He is playing something on the guitar vaguely familiar to me, and singing, making that face he reserves for just this. It’s half concentration, half “I’m a musician and this is the face musicians make.” The sun is filtering down through the early springtime leaves, just back on the trees, and if you forget the daily stress due to an upcoming move, an upcoming wedding, the daily perils of grad school for him, and my own, personal conflict at being 27 and not sure “what to do with my life,” then yes. Yes, this is perfect.

We met a wedding. Specifically, we met at Max and Karla’s wedding, mutual friends we knew from different points in our lives – Justin in college, and me when my live in boyfriend started working with Max after we moved to Raleigh. That’s where the story gets interesting. In September of 2000, a year before the wedding, this particular boyfriend and I drove a U-Haul down from Boston where we’d both gone to college and where we’d dated for four years. No jobs, no place to live and North Carolina seemed to us some kind of Utopia where rent was incredibly low and jobs plentiful. We weren’t far off that year. We moved from the hotel where we’d stayed for a few days while searching for housing to an apartment in North Raleigh one hot day in the pouring rain. You couldn’t tell one complex from another up and down Creedmoor, Millbrook, Six Forks Roads. Unlike the rusty pipes, graffiti, and creaky stairs of our places in Boston, these places were clean and had new rugs and accessible, pleasant landlords. I paused on each step for a good thirty seconds when we carried up the futon mattress. It was deceptively heavy and we lived on the third floor. I wasn’t very helpful.

Justin and I live, as I mentioned, in a rented house and we’re about to move to another. We’ve been packing up slowly to try and make the event less stressful. We got in a small argument one night when I got tired at 8:30 and wanted out of the day-by-day moving plan. I wanted to read in bed. Sometimes we lay there in the first sleepy moments of daylight before the alarm has gone off and the dogs start to whine and say incredibly sappy things like, “I can’t believe we met.”

One hallmark of Max and Karla’s wedding was this bartender at the reception. Every time he’d pour me a Jack and Coke he’d smile a mischievous smile and pour a little, then a lot more liquor. This was Labor Day, 2001, and most of us were just a year out of school. Max and Karla joke sometimes now, saying they had their wedding too close to college, which is why certain things happened, like when our friend Eric got locked, naked, out of his hotel room. There were two groups: The people who worked with Max at a high profile computer data company in the Triangle, and the people who’d attended James Madison University with the newly married couple. I myself was a mere significant other, but as I’m wont to do when in the presence of large groups of strangers, I needed to roam. The night before the wedding most of the guests gathered in a hospitality suite in the hotel. A red-haired, wild-looking young man popped his head out of the suite, coincidentally right across the hall from our room, and said, something like “Hey, we’re having a party.” It was only minutes after we’d entered that room that Justin, wearing a blue t-shirt with yellow writing – “Patrick Henry Elementary” – that he still wears, walked over and said, “Hi.” The next night was the wedding and the mischievous bartender and we never stopped talking.

Our new place has a turquoise door and a porch with two white rocking chairs. We aren’t ready to buy, because Justin’s only got a year or two left of grad school and we want to move someplace new when he’s done. My current favorite is Seattle. He likes that idea too, but we’ve also talked about San Francisco and Portland, Oregon. It’s only talk for now. We’re concentrating on the immediate move, only five minutes from where we currently live. I like the excitement of moving and it’s hard to concentrate on other things. When we’re married, I worry, our styles will be so different we’ll offend each other. I love to go through drawers, throwing sheaves of paper, old magazines and other “treasures,” kept for one reason or another, away. Justin piles them up, anxious to hold on to anything that was once of value. “What will happen,” I ask him, “if, when we’re married, and this is all “ours,” I get rid of something you love because I don’t think we need it and you get angry at me?” He tells me that wouldn’t happen because I’d, of course, ask before making such a decision. I agree.

We first talked about it – the feelings – at the World Beer Festival in Durham in October of 2001. Because it was an appropriately festive occasion some of Justin’s friends drove down to join us for the weekend. I went, naturally, with my boyfriend. We all met up and received plastic cups. Hundreds of different kinds of beer. After walking, alone, to the far edge of the tent, Justin and I got into a discussion. It held an “I have to tell you something” vibe. He suggested we say what was on our minds at the same time so no one would be embarrassed. “What if it isn’t the same thing?” I asked him, to which he answered he thought it probably was. He went and I didn’t, scared, but then elated to hear “See, I really like you…”

Boxes now fill the hallway leading to our garage, and where there used to be bookshelves there is newly discovered dog hair, pennies, and “lost” jewelry. In addition to the move I’ve been on a big wedding kick. It’s only six months away. We need to finalize the guest list. We need to make sure they have places to stay, and soon the fun stuff will begin, like visits with the caterer, bachelorette and bachelor parties. We need to register for kitchen appliances. Our blender smokes when you use it for more than thirty seconds. It is hard to believe we need a thing, what with the books and artwork littering the house. It sits in piles. I know that after we’re married our lives will intertwine in even more practical and romantic ways. We will share a bank account which scares me to death, and we will wear wedding rings, which will take some getting used to. I’ll have a new last name.

The boyfriend I dated for four years in college now lives in New York City and is happily ensconced with a girl and an active social life. Four months after that fateful wedding he and I had broken up. It’s easy to say but there were heartfelt conversations with friends over coffee who wondered “What, exactly, do you think you’re doing?” There were truths I had to convince myself, and many others, of over and over again. Justin was unbelievably patient. Four months after we’d met at that wedding, I’d made a decision and we went to a New Year’s party together in Richmond. The party was thrown by a friend of his from college, the guests were on our side. There was no discussion of specifics. He and I didn’t talk about what traditionally happens at the stroke of midnight on New Year’s Eve. Nobody did. We talked all night again. We got each other beers. We never remembered whose cup was whose. Months later we were recounting those first crucial interactions before we were officially together. We remembered the times when everything we did in each other’s presence and said to one another was so important because it all played a part in a potential future together. He told me, when we got comfortable enough to talk about those times, that just before midnight on the New Year’s Eve we spent at a friend’s party in Richmond, he’d run upstairs to brush his teeth. Just in case.

This morning I received a phone call from my great friend Max Bobbitt, who “evacuated” from Wilmington last night up to our place in Chapel Hill, in order to escape Tropical Storm Opheila, reportedly sustaining 70 mph winds.

He called to tell me something. “I did something bad,” he said.

As I envisioned my elderly cat, perhaps accidentally smothered, I asked him, “What?”

“I locked myself out of your house.”

This was no problem, I figured. “Max,” I said. “That’s alright, let’s…”

“I locked myself out of your house and I had to do something bad to let myself back in.”

I’d like to pause at this point in the story, to hearken back to Christmas Eve, 2004. Max, and others, had spent the night before at my parent’s house after we’d all been out drinking. This was typical behavior - we’d all taxi back to the Rotondaro home and drink some more, passing out wherever, and the parents always knew that’s where everybody would be. But on Christmas Eve morning, long after the others had gone home, as appropriate on such a major holiday, Max slept on and on until it neared 4 p.m., and I deemed it prudent to go and tell him that he should probably think about hanging out with his family, who no doubt figured he was sleeping the day away. See, Max is a notorious late-sleeper. Plus, he’s pure evil when you wake him up. So I wasn’t looking forward to this interchange, but when I got over to the room above the garage, where all these late night sessions are always held by my friends and I, I could not help but be filled with the spirit of Christmas joy. Lucy, the then six-week-old labradoodle puppy my brother and I had gotten to surprise our parents on Christmas morn (the way we pictured it: the most adorable puppy ever known to man, teary-eyed parents touched by the gift after the recent death of our poodle, Ziggy, and presents and hugs and magic - the way it happened: my father screaming “Oh FUCK WHAT IS THAT?”)was sitting on the bed, wagging her tail wildly, while Max muttered incomprehensibly. Then I noticed the huge puddle on the sheets, where the puppy had obviously relieved herself sometime during the night. Max, I’m sure, went on tossing and turning and sleeping in it for a good 14 hours or so, without ever noticing, or yelling at her or moving, or caring really.

Then there was that time young Cecilia chewed up his wallet, license and other important cards when I lived in my studio, but he still lets her crawl up in his lap and sleep now that she weighs 65 pounds.

And the fact that Max told everybody I was going through “a transitional phase” and smiled and hugged me, or gave me an encouraging pat on the shoulder, when I was ending a five-year-relationship and getting together with J, while others just wondered “what the hell are you doing?”

Max is reading the always predictable Corinthians bible passage at our wedding, and when I asked him to do so he very practically explained that his mother was an Episcopal priest and he’d be a good reader.

So, despite the fact that my friend, as a “last resort” may have broken a window to get into my house, it is clear to me that in this short life, love and friendship and that beer he promised would be waiting for me when I get home…these things conquer all.

J and I just spent another weekend up in DC, this time to attend a cocktail party thrown by dear family friends, as well as show J’s parents the bay, where we will throw a rockin’ party in a mere few weeks, after we are wed in an incredibly long and probably tedious ceremony. The party is meant to soothe the nerves of those wedding guests who are not Catholic and don’t understand all the hubbub surrounding our union with Jesus Christ. Those wedding guests who think our wedding ceremony, like everyone else’s, will last about 15 minutes. Oh man, are you guys going to be pissed.

On the way back last night I watched the road signs carefully, as I’ve got a new favorite activity to make the four-hour drive bearable, and that’s listening to books on CD. Specifically, books on CD rented from Cracker Barrel, where they’ve got a program. The program goes like this: You rent the CD’s, listen, and then take them back to any Cracker Barrel in the U.S. for a full refund of the price of the item, minus a small usage fee. Luckily in the South there’s a Cracker Barrel ’round every corner. Unfortunately, that hasn’t prevented me from accidentally keeping about three of these rentals so long that my charges got high enough and there was no use bringing the thing back. Still I take part.

I’ve never really liked Cracker Barrel - not the food or the people who work there or anything like that. It’s just that cookie-cutter “General Store” atmosphere. I mean, I know I can travel down the road to Morrisville, or Henderson, or any other town in Southeast on my travels back and forth to plan above mentioned party, and there’s the same “General Store” with the same products, and I swear to the Lord, sometimes what looks like the same customers. And last time I was there, I was forced to wait at the checkout counter for some time (probably so they could create a “DO NOT SELL BOOKS ON CD TO THIS GIRL” profile by secretly snapping my picture and digging up a database of how many “NY Times bestsellers” I’d failed to return) and while I stood, I checked out some of the items for sale, like the “Grammaws oatmeal cookies” and “Auntie Pauline’s apple cobbler” candles, and all I could think was “Hey, let’s not teach people to say ‘Grammaw’ ok?” and I just wanted to get my book on CD and get out of there.

The thing is that lately, every time, I see somebody, like some kid yelling for candy or a huge family that obviously gets together every Sunday for dinner or somebody’s grammaw being led out to the car by her son in law or whoever and, just for a moment, Cracker Barrel is my favorite place - on the highway, anyway. All of them, stretching out like beacons that light my way home.

I am sitting at a table with coworkers from the newspaper, enjoying pleasant banter, when I spot the figure moving rapidly towards us and then an all-too-familiar voice cries, “Is that the brat?!” before I am taken in a perfume-laden embrace from behind and she is upon us. My 78-year-old friend is wearing a green felt fedora and matching ensemble. Her makeup is very “done”. I receive a kiss on the cheek and can feel the lipstick implanting itself in my pores and as I’m recovering she has grabbed hold of my friend to the left and is kissing his head. She is kissing his head. As I struggle to overcome my fight or flight instinct and regain composure, introductions are made, for despite the extraordinarily familiar behavior (the kisses, liberal use of the words “darling” and “sweeite,” the question, “Would it be alright if I sat here and rubbed legs with you?”), she is unknown to all at the table except for me. The strange thing is that this escapade occurs at all. This isn’t how I pictured it when I pictured my life, my twenties, rambling down bustling urban streets. The stranger thing is that it doesn’t jostle me too much. It is another day in this small town.

From: cara rotondaro
To: mcdonoja@hotmail.com
Subject: Whereabouts?
Sent: Thursday, March 14, 2002 6:34 PM

Dear Friend Justin,
It has been some time since your “self”-enforced exile and we are curious concerning your current location and activities. It is with sadness that we report it does not appear you will be needed back on the CARA project any time soon. Fortunately (if you can find it in your heart to congratulate him) this does mean that Non-Friend Justin (a.k.a. Justin with all of the redeeming qualities of Friend Justin yet undeniable completely physically and romantically involved in previously mentioned project) is doing quite well. In fact, we hear rumors from our contacts in the North Raleigh area that the girl is crazy about him.
We do wish to reiterate at this time that if you desire to return to your former residence and relinquish all power to Non-Friend Justin while you remain in the background, you have our blessing and encouragement. In warning, we suggest you fully understand that these two, after months (with the help of your patience) remaining in “just friends” mode, are certainly more than that now and won’t be returning to their previous status any time soon. Numbers are currently in the hundred thousands of years on this couple’s staying power, and rising every day.
Please let us know your thoughts and if you need any additional information, or assistance.

Best Regards,
The Society for the Furthering of Complexities
in Platonic Relationships in Favor of Something
Way, Way Better
(established Sept. 1, 2001)

From : justin mcdonough
Sent : Friday, March 15, 2002 8:11 PM
To : crotondaro@hotmail.com
Subject : Re: Whereabouts?

Ms. Rotondaro,

We have information as to the whereabouts of “Friend Justin”. Much like Elliott the dragon left Pete after his work was done, so to did Friend Justin after his brief stint in aiding you during your troubled times. At 11:57 PM on New Years Eve 2001, “Friend Justin” split from his former self and went to Bermuda, where he met up with an owl named Archimedes who was in search of his master - the wizard Merlin. So, “Friend Justin”, Archimedes, and a rag-tag band of orphans who called themselves, “The Lost Boys” traveled around the island of Bermuda looking for the great wizard. Instead, they found the other side of the island. They decided to set up camp and have a feast using the three little pigs on their fire built by a scraggly looking Tom Hanks and 10-year old Kurt Russell who left his own Swiss Family back on a nearby island. However, Friend Justin became obsessed and went off by himself in the woods where he sat alone and stared at a rotting pig head with lots of flies covering it. He sits there to this date, watching the flies and thinking about all those Disney movies he watched as a kid. Stupid hound-dog…whatcha you wanna grow up for anyway…can’t you see that Tod still wants to be your best friend?!?!

J.A.M. - I’m going to wear a suit to that party for us this weekend.

C.M.R. - I need to get something new.

J.A.M. - Why?

C.M.R. BECAUSE I’M THE BRIDE.

J.A.M. - I think you should wear that white dress with polk-a-dots.

C.M.R. - Can’t.

J.A.M. - Why?

C.M.R. - It’s after Labor Day. Can’t wear white.

J.A.M. - What? That’s RIDICULOUS. I mean, I’ve heard of that, but who makes up these rules?

C.M.R. - It’s not ridiculous. It’s fashion.

J.A.M. - How do you know when it’s ok to wear white again?

C.M.R. - Memorial Day.

J.A.M. - Oh my God.

MVC-010L
Originally uploaded by caramaria.

One day I shall write a novel, completely fictional (cough, cough,) about a young woman who moves to the South after graduating from a university in New England. The work will follow her through her twenties as she makes friends and falls in love, and will highlight some of the most notable events from life down there in North Carolina, and will be narrated by an elderly and unnamed observer who spends most of his time sitting in a rocking chair on his front porch, watching the pickup trucks drive by, lifting dust off the gravel road, and he’ll say:

“When she come down here in these parts ain’t nothing ’bout the South she knowed. She ain’t know ’bout no dumplins and she ain’t know ’bout no sweet tea. Well, one day she was wandering over thar at that thar farming festival and my cousin Jimmy told me that he said to her, ‘Hey girl, get up on this here horse’ and she did. And she petted that big horse named Bob and she said, “Thanks. I love horses.” Now Jimmy, he don’t care none for Northerners, and that girl had been thinking that she’d done had about enough of the ‘Southern culture,’ that’s what she said, but she did certainly love that horse Bob! Now Jimmy, he’s one that gets to huntin’ each fall and sometimes sips back on those bottles cousin Tommy’s been brewin down thar since way back when we was just youngins, but he does like to bring them big horses out at the fairs and such. She just loved that horse. And that’s when she got to thinkin’ ‘It’s not so bad here,’ she said in her own mind. She thought that if she up and done left it down here, she right might miss it someday.”

I haven’t written for a couple days despite the fact that I recently decided it would be good practice to update this blog daily. Not only because throngs of avid fans, desperate for my brilliance depend on it, but because I thought it would be a way for me to practice my writing skills and also get into the habit of doing something so a daily basis. My parents have this friend, Ron. Last time I saw him he was happily running a gem shop in the Castro in San Francisco, and I suppose he’s still there. Ron had also written a book and when we caught up out west I was still a college student, anxious to learn anything I could about the art of becoming a great writer and Ron, as we sat in the restaurant near the Ghiradelli chocolate store (where, by the way, they give you a piece of chocolate each time you enter - not just, you know, once, even though you keep exiting and coming back in over and over again), said that the best advice he could give me was: “Write every day.”

Finally, at twenty-seven, I’d like to try that. Even if it doesn’t amount to a bestseller I’ll still have a log of my thoughts and adventures.

The reason, however, I haven’t written lately isn’t laziness. Honestly, every time I thought of something funny or ridiculous I’d like to share on my blog I couldn’t get it out of my head that the first thing I needed to do was at least acknowledge the disastrous situation in New Orleans and its surrounding areas. The stories are unspeakably sad. I realize I don’t have the slightest idea what it is really like to be down there but their voices on the radio, their pictures and the descriptions in newspapers give me some idea of the utter despair. Thankfully, there are good people to help. I’m not even going to try and address my anger regarding the sloppy response of the government (I’ll save that for beer-drinking nights out and then you’d better WATCH OUT) but I have been impressed by the good nature of many individuals who’ve donated money and time and food to this cause.

There are, of course, many more interesting opinions and sources of information than mine.

This is a link to a story from Sunday’s New York Times, demonstrating that while things might be, at least, better at the Houston Astrodome, Katrina’s victims still have a very long road ahead. This article really got to me.

This is a link to a blog my friend Mike pointed out to me. It’s being run out of New Orleans about the situation there and includes pretty unbelievable descriptions of individual’s attempts to get food and water and simply understand what’s going on.

Most importantly,this is a link to the Red Cross site - it is incredibly easy to donate online.