The Butterflies
A response to “One Day” by Gene Weingarten
It was a bad time to be a business owner in Rapid City, South Dakota in 1984. But it was a great time to throw a wedding.
The wedding of Frank and Lenore Mulligan was quick and cheap, thrown together on a salary of a newly minted air force recruit and a fashion student. Lenore found her wedding dress, a heap of designer taffeta and shoulder pads, from a shop in its last days. Frank found a pair of small, silver-plated rings from a jewelry store touting their going out of business sale.
The wedding dress store, upon further inspection, luckily stuffed their tuxes in the back.
The couple arranged their wedding in about a month after their unexpected engagement.
When the two were still dating, the air force reassigned Frank to a new post, a mere 4,753 miles away from Rapid City, in Frankfurt, Germany. He hadn’t had the chance to tell Lenore yet.
When a fellow airman congratulated Frank on his reassignment, Lenore, who liked to jump to conclusions, was not thrilled.
“Were you just going to leave without telling me?”
The ensuing fight resulted in an engagement that night and a wedding a month later.
Their wedding was on May 10, 1984, in a little chapel on the airbase where Frank worked. Looking back at photos, the 18-year-old Frank was a string bean, barely old enough to shave. Lenore, 19 looked every bit the height of 80s fashion, with a haircut that could rival Molly Ringwald’s.
The best photos of them aren’t their wedding photos, posed and perfect. It’s their rehearsal photos, candid with Lenore caught in laughter on Frank’s lap.
In the 36 years the Mulligans have been married, they’ve gone through the trials of moving countries, changing careers, children, natural disasters, death and all that life has to throw at a person.
My parents, Lenore and Frank Mulligan, still get those funny little butterflies in their stomach. So I waited for that feeling too.
By the time my parents were married and living in another country, I hadn’t even had my first relationship. I watched my friends fall in love, get heartbroken and do it all over again. I couldn’t tell if it was bravery or stupidity.
I got an inkling about a year and a half later.
The butterflies, which I’d felt only mildly in my stomach before, started up a storm on a chilly January night. They started with a jean jacket.
A few days before, I’d just gotten off a 14-hour flight. I was a nervous flier and so was my mother. I was the type of nervous flier that worried the plane would fall out of the sky. My mother, just nervous, was the type of flier that needed to be at the airport promptly three hours before takeoff or the plane would leave without us.
Another thing, my father has weathered my mother’s nerves for 36 years, a feat of its own.
Because of my mother’s nerves, I had gotten up at 2 a.m. to get to the airport. Because of my own nerves, I’d spent the entire 14-hour flight awake.
My eyelids had become bricks by the time I crawled into my bed.
I’d spent the next day asleep. Weeks before that, I had promised to go to a party on Jan. 4, the next night. Me and my jetlag debated whether to go. Somehow, my jetlag lost.
The eruption of butterflies in my stomach started when I saw him there in his light-wash jean jacket, laughing with a few friends, his dimples deepening. Suddenly, I wasn’t so tired.
Months later while watching Beetlejuice, my great aunt would look to Sean, the boy in the jean jacket, and say, “You look just like him.” She was pointing to Alec Baldwin.
It’s true he has the same floppy hair and glasses and even dimples. But, my great aunt is also almost 90, with a steadily declining eyesight. If you blurred your eyes, you could see it.
My parents set the standard of what love could be. I watched my friends try on love and then stuff it away in the back of some drawer. Ultimately, I’ve decided there is some bravery involved in it, but there’s also luck. All it takes is a day and the willingness to listen to the butterflies.
