peachtree street

I think I know how they choose the names for streets in cities. I figure the street-naming council gets together and writes down all the names that they think would sound nice and puts them on a list. Then they get a map, and a list, and blindfold the new guy, and go at it, just naming up all the streets. Which works fine, most of the time, unless, as seems to have happened in Atlanta, there was only one name on the list.

Today is the day before the tenth anniversary of my wedding. Which means today is the tenth anniversary of the Day Before the Wedding. Since that anniversary is so much more fun to remember, (than all the love and flowers and birdseed and blue drool of the actual wedding day) I will graciously relate that story here.

Jess and I were at my parents’ house, which is in a rural area two hours from Atlanta. We were going to be married in Atlanta. Simple enough? Since we didn’t want to drive the four hours over and over, we figured we’d hop on down to the Atl courthouse the day before the wedding and pick us up a wedding license, and be good to go. Oh, and since the blood tests that the local health department took weren’t going to be ready in time for the wedding, we’d also need to get a doc in the Atlanta area to do those.

Oh. And. By the way I had a cousin at the airport who would need to be picked up, by us, somewhere in the middle of all that. Still, not too hard: blood tests, marriage license, cousin, and then we’d meet our families at the Embassy Suites and cool our heels for the evening before tying the knot in the morning.

Due to a massive argument about whether we were actually going to GET married, en route to Atlanta, involving the stopping of the car and refusal to go onward until a resolution was reached, we were late reaching the doctor’s office. Late enough that he’d gone home to lunch. The receptionist said we could wait two hours and he’d be right back. Or we could go out to the Gwinnett County Health Center and get our blood tests done right away. Fine, we said, let’s do that. How do we get there?

Half an hour later we came screeching in to the Health Center parking lot and piled out. Now, pause a second here to consider. A couple of dewy-eyed, completely naïve kids from BYU walk into the Gwinnett County Health Center to be tested for a whole raft of nasty STDs before they can be married. Sounds like the beginning of a joke. Just saying.

So now, cotton balls taped to the inside of our elbows, running almost two hours late, we stand before the woman who gives you the all-clear and takes your money. She looked at our papers, shot one sidelong glance at me, another at him, and said, “You from North Carolina?” I nodded. “…and you from California?” Jess nodded. She knit her forehead. “And you getting married in Gawgia?” We both nodded.

“It’s the place to be,” Jess said, shrugging.

She was satisfied. “Well…” she said, in that tone that says, you’d better believe it is.

“How do we get to the Fulton County Courthouse?” Jess asked next. It was on this question that our quickly deteriorating day hung. And on its answer.

In my memory, I can see the woman, almost in slow motion, raise a finger and point west. “On Peach….tree….Street…..” she says, and in slow motion we nod, and turn toward the door.

Those of you know Atlanta are chuckling and shaking your heads. Did she actually say “Peachtree Street”? Or was it “Peachtree Industrial”? “Or “Peachtree Northwest?” All we heard was “Peachtree”, because we were both from places where each street got its own name.

The hours between the time we left the Health Center and five o’clock, when the courthouse was due to close for the weekend, are a horrible, streaky, tear-filled blur in my mind. We stopped at a gas station to get a map as soon as we realized we didn’t know our way around Atlanta. I sat in the passenger seat of my father’s car, trying to read the map as we lurched around corners and up narrow alleys, shouting instructions to my beloved who was disobeying them in an increasingly frantic fashion, and realizing with every lurch and U-turn that we hadn’t had lunch. And it was almost dinnertime.

Now, I don’t get hungry. Instead I get morose, sullen, spiteful, catty. If I were a murdering type, that’s when I’d do it, when there’s been no lunch and it’s almost dinnertime. It was 4:30. The trip that should have taken us half an hour had taken us nearly three.

This next turn should take us straight there, I said. THIS is Peachtree Street. It’s a one way street, he said. Which way? The wrong way. Down this street for ten minutes in the wrong direction. Why didn’t you follow my instructions? Why can’t you read a map? I can read it, why can’t you follow instructions? Because it’s a one way road, the map doesn’t say it’s a one way road….Besides, this isn’t Peachtree Street, it’s Peachtree Boulevard…and all the while he was beginning to shrink away from me toward the car door as he realized that in less than 24 hours, this was how it was going to be for the two of us…forever.

Infuriatingly enough, the last 15 minutes before 5 o’clock were spent actually in view of the courthouse, but going around and around on one way Peachtree Streets trying just to find a place to park and abandon the car and get in there before they locked us out and left us to explain to all our guests that due to our combined ineptitude the wedding would not be happening that day.

At long last we found ourselves (miraculously) on the street in front of the courthouse staring at one empty parking space. With a parking meter. I frantically scrabbled in the ashtrays of the car to find every dusty quarter I could salvage while he threw the car into park and sprinted for the door of the courthouse. I was standing at the parking meter, shoving quarters in as fast as I could go, when I looked up to see an old man chuckling at me. He was so completely like every caricature of a bum that I’d ever seen in my small-town life that I almost gaped to see him in reality-he had the baggy pants, gray stubbly beard, red eyes, and brown paper bag clutched in his hand. And he was laughing at me.

“Honey,” he said, “It’s the weekend! You don’t have to feed that thing on the weekend!” I stared at him in disbelief for exactly one-eighth of a second before tearing up the courthouse steps after Jess.

Inside the courthouse, everything was quiet air-conditioning and cool marble. I eschewed the elevator as being unbearably slow and took the stairs, two at a time. At the counter where marriage licenses are obtained, a large woman sat and regarded me imperturbably. Jess was nowhere to be seen.

“I…” I gasped to her, “I’m here to get a marriage license,” here I glanced uncertainly around, “but I don’t know where my fiancé is…”

She turned slowly to the man in the window next to hers. “You see a boy in here to get a marriage license?” she asked him. “Mmmhmmm? White boy?”

The white boy came around the corner just then, having gone down the elevator looking for me, and together we begged the woman to allow us to get married. She (and fortune) smiled on us, and we made what I believe must have been a speed record in marriage-license filling out.

We turned it in, the woman gave us the license, and we stood, grinning at each other and panting, in the foyer of the courthouse. Thank goodness, was all I could think. But the relief drained from my face when Jess said, “What about your cousin?”

Good grief. We were hours late picking up my cousin from the airport, it was rush hour in Atlanta, and we had no clue how to get to the airport. I considered, for a brief moment, walking away among the people on the sidewalk and disappearing forever from everyone I knew. Instead we threw ourselves on the mercy of the people working at the courthouse and told them about the uselessness of our map.

They pointed us toward the airport, and we were off again. By now I didn’t care about the wedding, or the cousin, or Jess, or anything but getting myself some food before I died. We pulled up at the curb at the airport and I leaped out, headed straight for the food court. The fastest thing I could get was an orange juice and a Danish, and I tore them both open and went striding into the terminal where my cousin was calling her mother in tears, chowing down like I was having a party and why wasn’t she having fun?

Somehow we made it back to the Embassy Suites where our families were waiting. Somehow I made it through dinner with all of them and managed to smile. Somehow, incredibly, the next day we still married each other. And now, ten years after the fact we look back, if not exactly with laughter, at least with a chuckle for a good story.

I believe, deep in my soul, that there's a special corner of hell for those who botch up this marriage thing really badly. A place where there is no lunch, no hope of dinner, a map drawn by a madman, and you're locked forever in a car with the person you're supposed to cherish as both of you come completely, repulsively unraveled. And every street is called "Peachtree."

“I swear I will NEVER live in Atlanta,” Jess growled under his breath as the airplane took off when it was all over. And we don’t. Not quite. I guess we haven't done anything bad enough yet.