Bride's mother flushes commode from gift registry

My Sainted Southern Mother's e-mail response, after viewing the link to our Home Depot gift registry, was swift, impassioned and emphatic:

"Remove the commode from your wish list. I will buy y'all a commode!!!"

Steve and I had no idea what we were doing when we registered for wedding gifts. Neither of us had done it before, so we just went for it.

We were combining two households' worth of furniture, linens and crockery into one and didn't need anything. So we figured, since people would be buying us stuff anyway, we'd ask for things we could use for home-improvement projects to expand my small house to double its occupancy from one person/one cat to two people/two cats.

It seemed logical to us to put a commode on our list; after all, we needed one and figured it would make a great house-tour story someday. "This is our guest bathroom. Aunt Martha gave us the toilet as a wedding gift."

We just wanted to get married and skip forward into "happily ever after" as quickly and painlessly as possibly. What doe-eyed naifs, babes in the woods we both were at the tender age of 36. We actually thought we could pull off a stress-free engagement and wedding.

"Here's what we're thinking would be fun," I told my mama over the phone. "We could get matching mechanics' coveralls, print 'Bride' and 'Groom' on the backs and get married at Slim's. The bartender has a mail-order ministerial license."

It is possible, I found out on that call, to feel a withering gaze down a long-distance phone line.

And so the negotiations began.

My mama would have been delighted for me to get married back home. My memories of weddings in the Methodist church I grew up in always went this way: a reading from the book of Ruth about the woman leaving her family to join her husband's, a piano-accompanied rendition of "The Lord's Prayer" sung by a great aunt, and an exchange of vows pledging obedience. The ceremonies were always followed by a reception involving ginger ale punch, cake and butter mints in the fellowship hall.

These weddings were always heartfelt and lovely, not to mention over and done with in an hour. But I didn't want to drag 40 people all the way down to Shallotte to witness my being struck by lightning after all those years away from the inside of the sanctuary.

Another option on the table was the opulent, three-day extravaganza complete with dinners, brunches and partying the night away. I have had some fabulous times at weddings like that over the years, but when Steve and I briefly discussed throwing one, we both felt instantly worn out.

After what seemed like years of debate, we reached a wonderful compromise, deciding to get married here in Raleigh at Mordecai Chapel in a Unity ceremony Steve and I worked with our minister to create.

It was dreamy. My dreadlocked, 6-foot-1 in heels sister towered over my side as my Best Woman. Across from me was my very favorite person, flanked by his mortified, profusely sweating, 14-year-old son and Best Man. We agreed not to segregate our attendants by gender, so our assorted people, men and women, stood by our sides, looking stunning in the getups we made them wear. (Seriously, those dresses could be worn again.)

We didn't want our friends and family to be bored during the ceremony, so we included them. We brought our mothers into our rose ceremony and assigned friends to give readings and "unsolicited" testimonials.

As for our own testimonials to each other, we were too nervous to read them and asked the minister to give them for us. And so a distinguished, gray-bearded man who had probably never heard of Journey spoke these beginning words for me:

"I was just a small-town girl, living in a lonely world. I took the midnight train from Shallotte."

Later on, at the reception at Slim's (my half of the compromise), I asked my Sainted Southern Mother if she had gotten the joke.

"No," she replied, "but everybody else was laughing, and that made me laugh. I've laughed all day."

Then, she gave me a check, explaining that it should cover the commode we wanted.