One night at a party in the Back of Yards, I met a small Mexican woman named Gloria Luis Hernandez.  It is impossible to recount what told me that she was something special – so improbable were we as a couple.  One day I was showing her photos of my trip to Tlacolula.

To my surprise, she knew the names of some of the market women I had snapped.  She pointed out to me which kinds of dress indicated which mountain village.  The ladies with the tomatoes from San Bartolo Albarradas wore colorful head scarves.  The ones from San Miguel del Valle wore aprons with flowered patterns.  Those from the most remote villages bargained in a combination of Spanish and Zapotec.

Gloria was always so happy to see me.  She moved in to my apartment on May Street and made the place a home.  Exotic smells from Dona Epifania’s recipes greeted me.  I started attending cookouts put on by Tino, my future brother-in-law.  His whole family had been butchers in Tlacolula.  Lamb chops, fried green onions, guacamole, Tecate, and bonds extending to a whole community of Tlacolulence living in Chicago.  They were all members of Club Oaxaca.

Gloria and I got married in 1985.  We went by ourselves to the justice of the peace in city hall.  I did have that moment of trepidation – especially getting on the escalator to go to the judge’s office.  I imagined myself as a hog in a packing house being prodded to its last chute.  But I was already 38 years old and my instincts told me to do this.  We’ve had many tough times, but this woman is the best thing that ever happened to me.  She correctly notes that were it not for her I might never have made it to age 66.  Or, she says, I’d be sleeping under a bridge somewhere.

The wedding party in my mom’s yard in Waukegan was a display of how many disparate threads I was weaving.   Swedish and Irish relatives from both mom’s and dad’s side of the family were there.  Gloria’s mom, Dona Epifania, traveled from Oaxaca with my new brother-in-law, Efrain, and a happy group of Chicago Tlacolulence.

Many movement friends had come down from Milwaukee including Cassie Downer, Gil Arroyo, Carol Beckerleg, John Kaye, Mike Rosen, Mike’s sister Laurie and his brother Jonny.  There was a crew from the protest art scene in Pilsen. To mark the festivities, folk-singer Chuy Negrete sounded a pre-Columbian note on a conch shell.  It was the last time I would see Mickey Jarvis.  He had been a constant critic of the dogmatists in the RCP.

And there were a bunch of Bridgeport bar flies.  A Mexican guy named Mech was one of my drug connections.  He brought an eighth of a gram for me.  Father Cull, a longtime friend of our family, gave a wedding benediction.  I told the crowd that I had worried I would always remain a bachelor like my namesake, Uncle Willy.  I praised Gloria for not giving up on me – despite two recent setbacks: “I got laid off from my job and evicted from my apartment. “  I added, “We have hope for the future.”  We announced that a baby would be due in about nine months.

I had picked up a whole side of beef in the packing district.  A friend, who was a beef boner by trade, sliced it up into steaks the day before.  It seemed like my cousin, Danny Drew, got a little overwhelmed in running the grilling.  He kept getting mixed up with the meanings of “tortilla” and “taco”.  So Gloria gave the high sign to some of her friends and relatives.  They moved in and took over the job as if on cue.  Big parties with lots of grilling are almost weekly affairs in their summers.

Toward the end of the night, my brother caught me laying out lines of coke by mom’s kitchen sink.  He showed a lot of strain and worry for me. “Not in your mom’s kitchen!”  He said later that was the first and only time that the two of us might have had to fight.  The next day, Mom found a bag of weed in one of my shirt pockets.  I couldn’t talk my way out of that.