unfair part 3

Larry slipped out of the office early that afternoon, making some excuse about needing to meet a washing machine repair guy at his house.

“What do you think Bonnie is going to say?”  Larry’s friend Parish asked between sips of left over mead Larry had pulled from the garage.

“I don’t know.”

Parish was twenty-four and when he wasn’t a Knight at the faire he taught P.E. at the local high school. It was at the faire where he and Larry first met. Of course pretty much everybody in Larry’s life he met at the faire.

“I haven’t told anyone yet, so keep it under wraps, okay?”

Parish nodded.

“That was supposed to be the big thing this year. Perfectly accurate down to the last detail.” The two sat looking out over the half finished catapult in the back yard. “I just don’t know. I don’t think anyone wants this anymore.” He said, gesturing to the blue tarp covered pile of armaments, jousts and maypoles littering his patio.

When Larry was Parish’s age he met Bonnie at the faire. She had been playing a maiden in one of the long sword shows that he had meticulously choreographed. There had been some fuss about Connie, a Pilipino woman playing a maiden in fifteenth century England but Larry wasn’t about to take it to that level. He said that in her heart she was historically accurate because she had the soul of a Renaissance woman. It wasn’t her passion for the period or even the collection of hand made costumes she had put together it was the fact that she never had the electricity turned on in her apartment that made him fall in love with her.

“I just don’t need it.” She said when he came over for their first date. “It interferes with our natural rhythms and disorients our senses. My day begins and ends with light and the sound of birds. It gives me space to think and breathe.”

He knew right then Connie was the real deal and within six months he proposed. Their wedding was held, naturally, at the faire. The ruler at the time, Queen Stacey, officiated at their ceremony and afterward they went on a honeymoon to Stratford Upon Avon. Even though they flew, Larry thoughtfully brought oranges.

“To ward off the scurvy on our long journey across the Atlantic.”

He was always doing things like that. They weren’t nuts. They didn’t go around San Bernardino in Elizabethan garb on a day-to-day basis, rather they carried with them small mementos of another place and time. It helped them stay connected to where they would rather be. It was only during those precious six weeks in the spring that they could actually inhabit their true selves and live as they truly desired to live.

They were so much in love that the modernity of England in the 1980’s didn’t bother them at all. The bed and breakfast failed to live up to the authentic experience as advertized – there was a Television in their room that Larry had promptly removed. They understood, no one did Renaissance as well as them, not even here in England among the ancestors of bubonic plague survivors. It was the two of them against the twentieth century.

Two years into their marriage Carla was born and Bonnie was unable to deliver at home with a midwife as planned. Complications forced them to abandon their candlelight delivery in favor of a more modern approach. Carla was delivered via cesarean as Bonnie’s hip bones were too narrow for vaginal birth. Had this been the fifteenth century she and their daughter both probably would have died. For the first time in his life Larry was appreciative of “the new.” That summer after the fair Bonnie applied for a job at the nearby AC Delco distribution center as they needed a second income to start saving for college. On her first day she sat down at a computer, stared into the screen and cried.

Carla grew up in a world of princesses and knights, kings and queens, wenches and vassals and she loved every minute of it. Her house was insanely popular with her friends, though not so much with their more conservative parents. Her classmates would clamor for an invitation to a slumber party knowing that they would get to try on armor or practice sword fighting or dress up like a princess and stand in an actual tower that Larry had built for his daughter as a sort of tree house. But she was fifteen now and starting to be looked at by her peers as gay or retarded or both. She told her father that she didn’t care what the kids said about her, she was above it and he admired her independent spirit greatly – it was much like his own.

The sound of the garage door opening alerted Larry and Parish that Bonnie was home.

“I should probably get going. Don’t worry, you’ll think of something. Change of venue might do us good.”

“That’s why you’re my First Knight. Always looking out for me.” Larry said. He poured the rest of his mead, which had gone sour over the summer, into a flower pot and headed inside.