Mawwiage... Mawwiage Is What Bwings Us Togeva Today

So, one of my best friends from high school (Doug knows him), Tyler Batten, recently got remarried again in a small ceremony of just him, his wife, his son with his wife-then-paramour (I don’t know the proper terms, but it sounds better than baby momma), and a local St. Louis friend for a witness.

I’m happy for him because I’ve met this woman, and she has a good sense of humor unlike his previous wife.

His previous wife was a cross between a harpy and Martha Stewart. She was very good at crafts and decorating the house, but she had very little sense of humor. An in-joke between Tyler, another mutual friend, Brett, and me was that we were going to have swords at our weddings. Jennifer was told this and was aghast. During the rehearsal dinner, Tyler’s dad gave them a Photoshopped image of Jennifer with a word balloon saying, “Of course, you can have swords at the wedding… and spears and spikes and nunchuks…” When she opened that, she loudly exclaimed, “No swords at *MY* wedding!”

And there weren’t any. However, there were at the reception as Brett and I gave them a set of decorative samurai swords set up at the wedding party table. I have a picture of the happy couple as they entered the reception and see the swords for the first time – Tyler’s thrilled to death. Jennifer’s smile doesn’t reach her eyes.

Anyway, they divorced because Tyler, a great guy, hard worker, and a good provider, was unable to give her the fantasy life she always imagined she would have without the need to work for it (can you tell I didn’t like this chick?).

Once when I visited them, they were painting the kitchen using some method where you dip a rag in paint then smear it on the wall. Jennifer launched into a long explanation of this method and finished up with, “And I bet you can tell which side Tyler is painting (with much disdain in her voice) and which side I’m painting. This was the second worst time I had ever seen her pissed off – when I told her I honestly couldn’t.

This is a story about the worst time I ever saw her pissed off, which now that I think about it had to be about at 30% her max since it was over such a trivial thing. About a year into their marriage around Christmas time, I was back in Clearwater to pick up Brett to go into Wichita to visit Tyler and Jennifer. We stopped at Tyler’s parents to wish them happy holidays and talked with them for a while. Before we left, Tyler’s mom gave us a puke green rooster figure with fake green jewels for eyes to take to him. Apparently it had been made by his favorite aunt in the 1970s (thus the puke green color). When we got to Tyler and Jennifer’s, we didn’t show him the rooster as we thought it would be fun to surprise him. So after Jennifer showed us all the homemade Xmas decorations she had made (and got mad at me for calling her cat an atheist because he kept batting the baby Jesus out of the manger scene), she left to go shopping. Right before we left to go to the movies, Brett slipped the rooster onto the mantle on the fireplace.

When we came back, we were met by a pissed-off Jennifer with her hands on her hips, arms akimbo. When we first walked in, she pointed at the rooster and demanded, “Where in the hell did *THAT* come from?” Tyler was very happy to see it. Jennifer was still fuming that we had thrown off the décor of the room of a house that sat empty for 3 hours. Horrors be if she had had a guest over, or it was discovered during a holiday cocktail party.

In the end, Tyler moved it into their office, where they each had their own desk and computer and put it on his desk… which was already heavily decorated with Jennifer’s stuff. A few weeks later, the rooster went missing, and it’s never been seen again.

There’s a pottery place in town called, “The Purple Glaze,” (righteous duuuuude). I called them. They have both rooster figures and puke green paint. I think I know what Tyler’s belated wedding gift is going to be. A few fake green jewels super-glued on it will complete the masterpiece.