Procrastination is one of my major talents, and for the past month or so, I’ve had the perfect excuse for delay. Every time somebody has asked why I haven’t yet done something I was supposed to do, I have replied, “My older daughter’s getting married on the 17th, and until that happens, it’s real hectic here. I’m doing the best I can, but I’m sure you understand.”
And of course, they do. Despite all the talk of the decline of traditional family values and how they can be restored just by electing sanctimonious right-thinkers who will give their campaign contributors the keys to the public treasury, weddings are still a pretty big deal.
Wedding customs do change, though. For about as long as I can remember, the father walked the bride down the aisle. Now it’s more sensible: Both mom and dad can make the walk with their daughter.
So it came to pass that at the Rotary Amphitheater in Riverside Park on Saturday afternoon, Martha and I stepped down the path with our Columbine. A few minutes later, County Judge Bill Alderton, wearing his robe of office over a snap-button shirt, blue jeans and cowboy boots, pronounced her married to Brad Goettemoeller. (During the weekend, I learned that the trick to remembering how to spell it is that every third letter is an “e.”)
Until the spring of 1999 and the massacre at Columbine High School in Jefferson County, the usual response to her name was “Oh, what a pretty name.” I joked that it was an old Ute phrase which meant, “My parents were hippies in the mountains,” but the name actually came from Zane Grey, more or less.
We were living in Kremmling when Martha was pregnant with her, and one of the local old-timers said that Zane Grey had spent some time in Middle Park long ago, and that one of his Westerns resulted from the visit. I made further inquiries, and found the book, “The Mysterious Rider.”
It did take place near Kremmling, mostly at a ranch up the Troublesome, and the heroine’s name was Columbine. I knew it as our state flower, of course, but had never thought of it as a person’s name until I read the novel. It seemed pretty and appropriate, and Martha and I decided that if the impending baby was a girl, we would name her Columbine.
(In those days, prospective parents generally did not learn the sex of the offspring until delivery. And if the baby had been a boy, I was ready with Edward Kenneth Quillen IV – not very creative, I grant, but easy and traditional.)
Columbine and Brad both grew up in Salida. They sort of knew each other even though they were three years apart and ran with different crowds. Brad was a football star while Columbine was often in trouble for ditching pep assemblies. One of Brad’s best friends was Nate Ward, and Nate’s little sister Sarah was our daughter Abby’s best friend for years.
Brad’s father, Jack, owned a shoe store and would occasionally drop by the newspaper office to complain about something or another that appeared in The Mountain Mail when I was its managing editor. However, I was forced to admit to Jack last weekend that I had no specific recollections of his appearances, because, alas, visits by people complaining about the newspaper were not so rare as to be memorable.
Brad went off to college – Mines and CSU – and then a job with Hewlett-Packard before he ventured into the dot-com boom just before it burst. He’s back in it now with Web-page design, search-engine optimization and the like.
After high school, Columbine went to Iceland as a Rotary exchange student for a year, then to Western State in Gunnison. She seems to have inherited one of my deficiencies: working 100 hours a week to keep from working 40. She tends bar, makes jewelry and guides river trips.
That would make her a fairly typical Salidan, but she and Brad are buying a house in Bend, Ore. Abby and her husband, Aaron Thomas, live in Eugene. Abby keeps telling me that I’d like Oregon: “It’s a lot like Colorado, except it has trees and water and Democrats.”
Maybe I’ll find out someday. But for the time being, I’m just a happy father, glad that young people still have enough faith in each other to join together and face the future.
Edward Kenneth Quillen III of Salida (ed@cozine.com) is a former newspaper editor whose column appears Tuesday and Sunday.
