Tunesday : Whole Lotta Love

Whole Lotta Love

(Bonham, J /Dixon, W /Jones, J /Page, J /Plant, R) Performed by Led Zeppelin

You need cooling
Baby I'm not fooling
I'm gonna send ya
Back to schooling

A-way down inside
A-honey you need it
I'm gonna give you my love
I'm gonna give you my love

Wanna whole lotta love
Wanna whole lotta love
Wanna whole lotta love
Wanna whole lotta love

You've been learning
Um baby I been learning
All them good times baby, baby
I've been year-yearning

A-way, way down inside
A-honey you need-ah
I'm gonna give you my love, ah
I'm gonna give you my love, ah oh

Whole lotta love
Wanna whole lotta love
Wanna whole lotta love
Wanna whole lotta love

You've been cooling
And baby I've been drooling
All the good times, baby
I've been misusing

A-way, way down inside
I'm gonna give ya my love
I'm gonna give ya every inch of my love
I'm gonna give ya my love

Hey!
Alright! Let's go!

Whole lotta love
Wanna whole lotta love
Wanna whole lotta love
Wanna whole lotta love

Way down inside
Woman, you need, yeah
Love

My, my, my, my
My, my, my, my
Lord
Shake for me girl

I wanna be your backdoor man
Hey, oh, hey, oh
Hey, oh, hey, oh
Ooh
Oh, oh, oh, oh

Cool, my, my baby 
A-keep it cooling baby
A-keep it cooling baby
Ah-keep it cooling baby
Ah-keep it cooling baby
Ah-keep it cooling baby

I wrote last week that this week's Tunesday would be about my younger brother's wedding, and now that I'm here, I'm finding it hard to shape my message about it - that was a weird day for my family, it began the cooled relationship we now have with K and C (they're too digital for me to want to make this post easy to find by putting their names together in it; it's not for them and it's certainly not meant to offend them), and I really don't want to overstate what a weird day it was and make it seem like we're feuding because of it. We're not feuding; I love them both, but this may explain a bit why we don't see them too often. Led Zeppelin was always my brother's favourite band (although he has apparently given them a rethink recently, agreeing that they probably stole all their best bits from earlier, and unacknowledged, African-American blues singers), so this song is for the him who would have appreciated it back in 1997.

My brother met his future wife when he returned to high school - K had graduated from grade 12 in Alberta, and taken a year of university, but when he then moved to Ontario with our parents, he decided to return for a year of grade 13 in order to boost his grades and get into the best possible post-secondary school now that he actually cared about his future - and K and C were together for nine years before they got married. Over all those years, my mother thought she had developed a special relationship with C, and certainly, Mum would have done anything for her. In the time that Dave and I had been living in Ontario again, we spent many a Saturday night with my brothers and their partners while Mum babysat Kennedy - I would have said that we had an ideal relationship and there was much closeness, laughter and bonding.

In the months leading up to their wedding, K would complain that his future mother-in-law was controlling too many of the details, but as C deferred to her mother in all things (as she apparently still does), "Mo" (as she likes to be called) was effectively the wedding planner; and what Mo said was law. This not that, these not those. My mother held a bridal shower at her house for C (because Mo said it would be tacky for the bride's mother to host it herself), but Mo was in charge of all the details - the decor, games, food - and as I arrived and surveyed the platters of tiny triangle sandwiches, the crustless white bread dyed pink and green and yellow, and saw Mo and her sisters bustling around and refusing any help from my own mother, in her own home, I could see which way the future lie.

Mo also thought she could control K's bachelor party, but my older brother took that on; Ken resisting all of Mo's suggestions, despite her insistence that she should have a say if the men of her family were invited. The party was held at some pub, and Ken and Dave "kidnapped" K the night of, clamping a homemade ball and chain to his ankle that K would need to carry around with him all evening. There was a lot of drinking, games and gambling that raised money for the groom, and the venue didn't mind that they had brought a giant pot of chili for the guys to eat near the end of the evening. Apparently our younger brother was so drunk that when he spilled chili on the dance floor, he then dumped the whole pot out and proceeded to break dance in it. When the owner then kicked them out - they were done anyway, the older men having left hours earlier - K then started to break dance in mud puddles in the unpaved parking lot to "clean up". Ken still wouldn't let K get into his truck, so they threw him in the back and let K get pummeled as he rolled back and forth, half passed out, on the drive back to Ken's house. Ken and his wife had just bought this place, and as K fought the guys as they tried to carry him up the stairs and throw him in the shower - grabbing and breaking the potted plant from halfway up the white-carpeted staircase - Dave had to go rent a carpet cleaner the next morning before Ken's wife saw what disaster K had wrought.

I don't even remember the details of all of the back and forth and the negotiations of who would pay for what that spooled out over that year (my parents were on the hook for a lot of it), but I can say that Dave and I were totally broke at the time. Still, we were (along with Kennedy) in the wedding party, and between the custom-made bridesmaid gown, Dave's tux, and my mandatory salon hair and makeup, it cost us a little more than five hundred dollars (that we really didn't have) to participate in their wedding. Money is a petty thing to mention, but it was so weird the way it all played out - Mum offered to buy their cake topper, because she had bought mine for my wedding, and at Mo's insistence, that turned out to be some crazy expensive piece of Belleek pottery (to "honour their Irish heritage"), which Mum bought and which was then displayed beside the cake. It was apparently a custom in their family for the bride and groom to use the engraved silver souvenir cups from their Baptisms as the cake toppers at a wedding, but that wasn't a custom in our family - we have no "engraved silver souvenir cups from our Baptisms" - but having learned this, Ken and I bought such a small silver cup for K to use as a shot glass at his bachelor party. This was not acceptable to Mo, and in the end, their wedding cake was topped with just C's cup; as per their tradition. Weird, right? I don't want to get into all the half-remembered details, but the months of planning were just one weird thing after another - this was Mo's wedding and we were playing by her rules.

Jump ahead, and the night before the wedding, there was a rehearsal and a rehearsal dinner, and the last thing my Mum asked Mo before she left was when they should show up for the pictures that would be happening before the wedding. Mo, apparently distracted, replied when the photographer would be showing up at their house, and that was left at that. We girls went to K and C's house to sleep, Kennedy was with me too, and in the morning we went to the salon and got dressed and went to Mo's house. Kennedy was asked to be the "Ring Bear", and she had the job of walking up the aisle with a little white teddy bear that had mock wedding bands attached to a ribbon; that was an adorable idea and we were delighted to have her included. Mo was close with her next door neighbours and had babysat the little girl and boy who lived there, so they were the flower girl and "tissue holder" (Mo had sent away for some promotional Scottie tissue holder [that white teardrop-shaped plushie that was their mascot/logo at the time] so Thomas' job was to walk solemnly up the aisle with it, looking for people who might be teary-eyed). When we got to Mo's house, Thomas decided that he'd rather have Kennedy's teddy bear, and being two years old, she protested when he grabbed it from her. I gently explained to Thomas that he would need to give it back, and as he screamed in my face, Kennedy crying behind me, Mo came running and told me to let Thomas have whatever he wanted; my job was to get my own kid in control. I was stung, but not really surprised. The photographer started taking candid shots of C and her family, and when my parents and grandparents showed up - as they had been told to? - Mo flew at them and started yelling that they weren't supposed to be there, my parents weren't supposed to see the bride before the church, they weren't needed for pictures until after the ceremony, who told them to interrupt their family time, etc. My mother was obviously stunned, tried to explain what she had thought was the plan, but Mo wanted them gone and Mum had to get herself and the old people back to the car, with nowhere really to go and it far too early for the church yet. When we did show up to the church together, Mo immediately beelined for my mother and continued yelling at her about not keeping to the schedule, and Mum had to retreat to the bathroom in order to get away and prevent herself from crying; Mo followed her and kept yelling at her from outside the closed door. (K asked me to be understanding: it was very stressful for Mo to watch her baby getting married, but our mother was watching her baby getting married, too; I can be accused of not always empathising when our Mum is acting nutty, but I did feel for her on this day.)

C was a gorgeous bride, and the ceremony was beautiful; every detail she (and her mother) had sweated over turned out perfectly. Kennedy was given her teddy bear back in time to wander up the aisle with it, hesitant and sucking on a finger from her free hand, and I think she must have sat with my parents during the ceremony. We went downtown for some beautiful portraits - including my parents and grandparents this time - and with the stress of the vows over with, I thought that maybe Mo could relax and enjoy the rest of the day. Maybe not.

We got to the reception hall - a newly renovated and gorgeous pavilion overlooking Lake Ontario - and in an example of C's brilliant planning, Dave's sister Rudy was there to sit with Kennedy during dinner and the speeches, and to quietly take her away when she became too tired. C's sister and I were tasked with handing out little craft packages for any kids in attendance (more planning brilliance), and after I handed packages meant for some kids on their side (who I had been told couldn't make it) to some kids from my side who hadn't been accounted for, Sherry started screaming at me, in front of these kids, saying that I had no right to give those away. I hadn't spent any significant time with Sherry before this - I only knew that she was a bit of a black sheep that my brother didn't care for - and I don't even remember what I said to her in reply, but I know it ended with me hissing that she better not say another word to me; we were not our mothers and I didn't have any reason to take abuse from her in order to preserve the peace (by which I mean: these latter words were thought, not irreversibly spoken). Sherry and I didn't exchange words again until the Baptism of K and C's son six or so years later; we remain polite but uninterested in one another to this day; which is fine.

The dinner was impressive, the atmosphere of the building was lovely, and C and her mother's decorations were perfect. Even so, there was a strange vibe. A coworker of my father's who had been invited - an Egyptian man whose beliefs might have played a part in his response - told my Dad later that he found it strange that the tables seemed perfectly divided between our side over here and their side over there with no mixing between the two; and that he sensed their side giving ours the evil eye all through dinner. For what's it worth, that's how an outsider saw it. (Note: My parents had way more money than C's parents, but they acted like they had more class. Apparently, because we don't give engraved silver cups to babies at their Baptism or dye our tiny sandwiches pink and green and yellow, we are little more then Hillbillies.)

The speeches came and Dave, as the MC, did a great job keeping everything moving along with jokes and efficiency. I remember my Dad getting choked up as he gave a speech - saying he thought that C was like the brightest bulb on a Christmas tree the first time he saw her in a group of K's friends - and while I don't remember most of the other speeches, K's friend Mark brought the house down. At first, he came up and started rambling about K and his friends and then he said that he was here to finally expose a long buried secret about Dave. Mark walked off to somewhere, and when he came back, he was holding a poster of Dave from a high school play, and as Mark strode from table to table to show it to all of the guests, he kept exclaiming, "He's Peer Gynt! Dave's Peer Gynt!" As the MC, Dave was standing off to one side in all of this, his face stunned and bewildered - why would anything be about him? - and I nearly peed myself laughing so hard (and I was so glad that Rudy was there to see it; she had to stop herself from peeing, too.) Meanwhile, Sherry was beside me stony-faced, not seeing the joke in it and acting like Mark was the biggest Hillbilly of us all (as C and K's high school friend, I don't know how he reflected on my family, but somehow he did) and the entire crowd was divided between those on my family's side of the room who were laughing and those on C's side who apparently found the whole thing distasteful. Mark then grabbed his guitar and started singing a song about K and C - he had reworked the lyrics to Hotel California to explain where K had come from (Alberta) and how their love story had played out (fated) - and it was hilarious and loud and too long, and still, one half of the room was enjoying ourselves and the other half acted like the display was beneath the dignity of the occasion.

Rudy and Kennedy left soon after dinner, I was relieved to leave the head table and get away from the cold-shouldering Sherry, and as I was enjoying spending the rest of the evening mingling with my own family, Ken suddenly came up to me and said, "Why haven't you been drinking?" I replied that someone needed to drive us all home. He clasped his hands together in a mock goody-goody gesture and said, "You're pregnant, aren't you?" I looked at him seriously and said, "If I was, I certainly wouldn't announce it at my little brother's wedding. Today's for him, so let's just leave it at that." But Ken knew, and some of our other relatives knew before the weekend was out, and I sincerely hope neither K or C ever thought I wanted it that way - I had planned the timing of this pregnancy specifically not to draw attention away from their day. (The picture at the top - which was the only picture we were given from this wedding, is actually our first complete family portrait - Mallory was definitely already there with us. It was Rudy who took this picture and gave us a copy.)

I don't even remember what else transpired throughout the reception - whether my Mum and Mo had further words - but my family's overall poor treatment, and my younger brother's reluctance to protest or otherwise interfere, set the stage for our ongoing family dynamics. I honestly don't remember if Mum and Mo have been in a room together since that night - my parents were retired to Nova Scotia when K and C's son was born, so neither of them were present for any showers or birthdays or whatever family events over the years - and that's weird, too. I know my Mum was hurt on that day, and I understand why K and C have embraced Mo's support over all the years that my parents have chosen to live away from us, but there's a distance between them and the rest of us that began at the wedding. There's a coolness, but there's also a whole lotta love. And that's all I've got to say about that.