Sunday Pages: "Never Again Would Birds' Song Be the Same"

A sonnet by Robert Frost

Dear Reader,

Today is our anniversary. Twenty-three years ago (!), at an old synagogue-turned-arts center on the Lower East Side, Stephanie and I “tied the knot” in what was, and I swear I’m not being biased here, the best wedding ever: moving ceremony, gorgeous venue, sumptuous flowers, perfect lighting, delicious food, ample beverages, a DJ who heroically resisted the urge to suck,¹ a hall packed with lovely humans, and, of course, a beautiful bride in a stunning wedding dress, ringed by blue-gowned bridesmaids, smiling from ear to ear.

My entire extended family piled on a chartered bus and crossed the river into New York City. That sounds like not a big deal, but for this bunch of New Jersey Italian homebodies, they may as well have been boarding a steamship back to the Old Country. As they filed out of the bus and into the heat of Lower Manhattan, one of my cousins—a generation older and thus a veteran of wedding attendance, who’d married into the family and was thus more worldly than most—pulled me aside and said, with absolute sincerity, “Thanks for not having this on Route 10.” (#IFKYK.)

Weddings are time capsules. A year earlier, a year later, the guest list changes a bit, along with countless other subtle shifts. In 2002, my mother was about as old as I am right now, my father just a year older. My brother Jeremy—my best man, who handled his role with aplomb—was a week shy of his 25th birthday, not that much older than my son is today. My grandmother had just turned 90, and she looked fantastic in her shimmering silver outfit. Her mind started to go right after that; although she lived eight more years, June 1, 2002 was the last time I remember her being lucid.

How things change! Some of the couples who dined on Chilean sea bass at the tables that night are no longer together. Almost a dozen people who attended the wedding have since died, including my grandmother and my father. We’ve drifted away from others. Too many of the guests I haven’t seen in God knows how long and wish I could hang out with right this minute; mostly, recalling the guest list, I feel like Holden Caulfield at the end of Catcher in the Rye: I just miss everybody. But that’s how it goes with weddings: one enchanted evening is a snapshot of a singular, unforgettable moment in time.

This was a few years before Facebook, a few years before Gmail, a few years before smartphones. Dial-up was still the way of the World Wide Web—which was still called that, with the Ws capitalized. Nowadays, there would be any number of photographs from that night, as well as short video clips, taken by most of the guests. Someone might even livestream the thing! But back then, even something as technologically simple as taking and sharing pictures required real effort. We had disposable cameras on all the tables, which we didn’t have developed until after we returned from our honeymoon, three weeks later.² Our friend Christine Preston brought a digital camera—the only guest to do so—and took most of the photos you see here. (Thanks, Christine!)

Looking back, it’s crazy how many people who are now so central in my life, and with whom I spend the bulk of my time, were not at our wedding. I either hadn’t met them yet or they did not exist. Our kids, obviously, were not even a twinkle in our eye, as the saying goes. Our oldest nephew, who was the ring-bearer, had only learned to walk a few weeks before the ceremony, and our other nephew and niece were not born yet. We had not yet fled the city for the Hudson Valley—that happened in 2005, three years later—and thus hadn’t met anyone we’d come to know after we relocated. I didn’t start the coin job until ten years after the wedding, so no friends from work attended. And of course there was no Nervous Breakdown literary community, no Twitter, no Substack, no PREVAIL comment board, no live YouTube show, no podcast, and no Amazon author page listing all my books, because I had only just gotten my agent—so anyone I met online was still a stranger. (I did have a column that I published on Tuesdays, but I had to update the HTML code manually, like the cloistered monks did in medieval times.)

And Donald Trump, if he registered in our minds at all, was so innocuous that on one of our first getaways together, I think for my birthday in 2001, Stephanie and I took a bus down to Atlantic City, where we stayed at the Trump Taj Mahal. Little did I know that a decade and a half later, I’d spend a healthy chunk of my working life writing about that asshole.

Stephanie and I came up with our own wedding ceremony. Loosely modeled on the structure of a Catholic Mass, but otherwise having nothing whatsoever to do with one, we had our friends sing songs³ and read poems before we exchanged vows, put on the rings, kissed, and then took off laughing down the aisle as “Jackie Wilson Said,” the happiest song I know, played on the loudspeakers.

Was it all a bit over the top? Sure. But I’d been to more extravagant weddings, and we wanted the day to be an expression of our love for each other, and also for our friends and family. We wanted everyone to enjoy themselves. We wanted to throw a good party. We wanted our wedding to be totally kick-ass. Furthermore, my father-in-law, God bless him, was happy (or, at least, willing and able) to foot the bill, in order to “give away” his only daughter in style. (I am at his house right now, as I type this, and I am pleased to report that he has no regrets.)

But back to the ceremony. For one of the “readings,” I chose a sonnet by Robert Frost, and gave it to my dear friend Jeff Duchesneau to read. Jeff was my roommate for three of my four years in college. He’s a charming guy, a big personality, and a natural performer, but a business major, and not someone naturally given to poetical analysis. I didn’t give him any notes, and I know he was a bit nervous about interpreting the lines correctly. Not only did he commit the poem to memory, he absolutely nailed it—every pause, every inflection perfect. It was fantastic. (Like Frost, he’s a Massachusetts guy, which didn’t hurt.)

I was taught that with poems, you should pay attention to the grammar, and if the lines form complete sentences, to read them that way. That is a particularly useful strategy with “Never Again Would Birds’ Song Be the Same.” Though unstated, the “he” Frost cites here is clearly Adam, still in his moment of pre-lapsarian wonder, in awe of and in love with his Edenic wife:

He would declare and could himself believe
That the birds there in all the garden round
From having heard the daylong voice of Eve
Had added to their own an oversound,
Her tone of meaning but without the words.
Admittedly an eloquence so soft
Could only have had an influence on birds
When call or laughter carried it aloft.
Be that as may be, she was in their song.
Moreover her voice upon their voices crossed
Had now persisted in the woods so long
That probably it never would be lost.
Never again would birds’ song be the same.
And to do that to birds was why she came.

I discovered the poem in my college poetry class, taught by Roland Flint, himself an amazing poet (although his students were too self-absorbed to realize it at the time). I found it incredibly moving and lovely. Yesterday, I came across an essay suggesting that the lines could be read positively or negatively—that Adam, “bitter about Eve causing the Fall of Mankind” may be “declaring that even before the Fall, Eve’s voice was already tarnishing God’s idyllic creation.”

Say whaaaaaaaat?

That may be technically true, I suppose, but never once, in all these years, did it ever even occur to me to interpret it as something sinister (nor did such an ominous reading occur to Jeff, thankfully). As I see it, the poem is unequivocally positive. It’s a love poem! About the original loving couple! However sonorous the song of the birds, Eve’s voice—her soft eloquence, her call and laughter—only enhances it, amplifies it, makes it whole. She unlocks something in the birdsong, like salt on French fries or bitters in a Manhattan. The birds by themselves are like watching something on your phone with crackly AirPods; Eve takes the birds and presents them on iMax, in full Dolby stereo surround.

She is, in a word, transformative. She makes everything better. She cuts the gem and makes it shine. Which is what Stephanie is, and does, to me and for me, still, to this day, 23 years later.

Happy anniversary!

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ICYMI

Fantastic episode of The Five 8. Zarina Zabrisky talks about her new documentary, Kherson: Human Safari, and LB and I have a lot of fun at the expense of Leonard Leo the “Sleazebag,” Elon Musk and his black eye, and the rumored Musk + Stephen and Katie Miller throupling.

1. We insisted—insisted—that the DJ play “Thank God I’m a Country Boy.” He started at us like we had two heads, but he played it, and everyone started singing and jumping around and doing square-dance moves, and he was so taken aback that he played it again. If you’re DJ’ing a party with Boomers and Gen Xers, I can’t recommend the John Denver song highly enough. Trust me.

2. Only one dick pic. Just kidding. Or am I?

3. Steph’s dear friend Marsh Hanson, who had played Marius in the touring production of Les Mis, sang “For Emily, Wherever I May Find Her,” accompanied by my dear friend Michael Preston on guitar. Holy shit was that good!