CityView Magazine

18 | November/December 2019 A M C F A D Y E N ' S M U S I N G S THE DOWRY BY BILL MCFADYEN A t age 34, my mom suffered daily angst over my bachelor status. I on the other hand was persevering through it bravely. From out of nowhere, a girl appeared at the sales counter of McFadyen Music in Green- ville, North Carolina, on a Friday. I asked her to marry me on Monday and 11 weeks later, we were husband and wife. at was nearly 25 years and three children ago. At the time of the announcement, my mom was immediately more in- clined to celebrate the death of my self-reliance than she was to suffer any embarrassment at Garden Club over the inex- plicably whirlwind nature of this wedding. Back in the would-be bride's hometown of Greenville, there was no such rationalization for this frenzied sprint toward matrimony. Why would a big-name hometown beauty leave a great sales position and vacate a just-purchased condo on a spontaneous profession of love until death? What was she thinking? Or the more obvious answer – she was not thinking. ree weekends into our courtship, I sat with her dad at a gathering of about 100 of their closest friends. It was a pig picking in Pactolus, North Carolina, for some event or an- other and it preceded any public announcement of our plans to complete the union. Her father and I were having a large time, getting along famously as we compared notes on hunting stories, fish tales, family businesses and all manner of loves we realized we had in common. As we two finally ended up with our plates and he was stuffing a mouthful of barbeque in his mouth, I popped the question. "Mr. Hudson, let me ask you some- thing. How would you feel about me marrying your daughter?" He was obviously stunned, and to the point of being unable to swallow his barbeque. So he pushed it into his le cheek and just let the partially-chewed glob sit there while he gazed at me, trying to discern seriousness from jesting. When I only stared back, he finally spoke. "Are you out of your mind?" Except that he strategically po- sitioned a Lord's-name-in-vain in the middle of the prepo- sitional phrase. e end of the very beginning of the story of her father and me is that on the night before I crazily married his daughter, a girl that admittedly I hardly knew at all, James Hudson and I spent that night together at my house whooping and laugh- ing and basically howling at the moon. He was my one-man bachelor party. We have oen repeated that scenario since then. Over these years, though, and with the benefit of reflection, it occurs to me that I le a lot of leverage on the table. Mr. Hudson's incredulity at hearing of our impulsive plans to- ward matrimony kind of threw me off from the strategy I had rehearsed all of my dating life to secure a fine dowry for myself at the taking of a wife. In short, my blindness in the light of passion caused me to forget that men in historical times got at least a couple of goats or a flock of chickens for agreeing to put aside bachelorism in exchange for both mo- nogamy and joint checking accounts. I mentioned this to James not too awfully long ago as we sat in the fading light of dusk on the porch of his cabin overlooking the cypress swamp bordering Tranter's Creek. I boldly invited him to retroactively produce a dowry, now that he knew I was not running out on Susanna and given that he had three fine McFady- en grandchildren who called him Paw Paw. To my surprise, he seemed willing.

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