As Thanksgiving approaches, I am once again taking inventory of blessings large (good health, loving family, gift certificate to the Outback) and pleasures small (children’s laughter, a whippoorwill’s song, Internet porn). But it was while sorting through my mail some weeks ago that I most acutely felt gratitude.
Mail-check time at the office is frequently mail-chuck time, as we toss, unopened, turgid think-tank backgrounders and treatises on the proper use of semicolons sent by over-caffeinated readers. But I have also come to expect surprises, often supplied by my friends in the business department, gifts that they hope, in the spirit of collegiality, will scandalize the interns and/or get me fired. Recently, one of them planted a Cherry Blossoms mail-order brides catalog in my box. For some reason, before I got far plotting vengeance by signing them up for the North American Man-Boy Love Association newsletter, I was overcome with curiosity. How lonely must a soul grow before turning to the Cherry Blossoms?
I am married five years, but in my single days, I don’t remember ever being quite that desperate. Growing up in a Texas church youth-group culture, one could always bank on modest success by going to the autumn hayride, which was rife with viceless, overripe Baptist girls, souped-up on wassail and primed for singalongs and heavy petting. During college, I saw real masters at work, as bloated frat-boys demonstrated subtle courtship techniques which went something like: Boy meets girl. Boy chats up girl. Boy slips gamma hydroxybutyrate into girl’s rum’n’Coke and sneaks her to his car before she regains consciousness.
Part of the fun of being married, of course, is the Schadenfreude from watching single friends flail helplessly: Like the acquaintance who’d take his dates, and his cassette player, to hot-sheet motels. At the magic moment, he’d pop in Foreigner’s “Feels Like the First Time,” believing wine coolers and classic rock were catnip to the ladies.
Then there’s John, a scampish Romeo who, while standing at a bar recently, pitching his best woo, was informed by the object of his affection that she’d never date a man “whose butt is smaller than mine.” Looking around the room, John mischievously replied, “Darlin’, that would eliminate just about every man in here.” Powell and Loy it wasn’t, but John thought he’d gotten off a real corker. (Fair Juliet disagreed, and slugged his glasses into a stranger’s draft beer.)
I do not miss episodes like these. At 29, having recently witnessed the birth of my first son, I sometimes feel on the fast track to what Sinclair Lewis called the “paralyzing contentment of middle age.” Perhaps that is why I occasionally tax sanity’s limits, such as when I rent three videos instead of two on Blockbuster nights. But the fun couples at Cherry Blossoms are an antidote to any restlessness.
The mostly Filipina and Eastern bloc buttercups who populate the catalog are a surprisingly comely lot, and will grow only more so as they are introduced to American orthodontia and electrolysis. Pictures of their lonely American suitors — targeted through ideal lonely-guy venues, such as classified ads in political magazines — suggest they hail from the fallen-arches/bad mustache side of the gene pool. But marriage, even mail-order marriage, is a compact, bringing mutual sacrifice and benefit.
Thus, the Cherry Blossoms groom will surrender his habit of uttering awkward pick-up lines at Bennigan’s happy hours, in favor of bribing immigration officials to secure exotic arm candy. And brides will forsake their corrugated tin shacks and 11 siblings in hopes of bearing some gaijin’s homely children and driving a Land Cruiser.
But all’s not chocolate and roses. In Cherry Blossoms’ special-order book, How To Meet Exciting Ladies From All Over the World, men are warned, before visiting their foreign brides, “Be prepared for the squat toilet, and if there’s no toiler paper, look around for a bucket of water with a ladle, which you are to use along with left hand in place of toilet paper.”
That’s a level of commitment rarely seen in this country. And the blossoms themselves are stalwart, demanding in broken-English ads only that their mate be “not dope fiend.” Adhering to these strictures may win a lucky groom one Lena from Moscow, who “want to acquaint with honest, provided, merry man for serious treatment. I’m looking understanding. I do exercise at one’s leisure.”
I now recommend this book to single friends and, consequently, have few of them left. But the book has made me thankful that for me, love struck early and the search is over. I expect it will stay that way. Not only does my wife speak beautiful English and have remarkably tartar-free teeth, but she regularly purchases toilet paper. Besides, I am not dope fiend.
MATT LABASH
