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Accepting Change In Our Calm, Steady Way (Hartford Courant)
Friday, November 14, 2008
By: Rick Green
This boring land-of-steady-habits way of doing things may not be so bad after all. The thing I've long hated about my native state is now what I might actually like: We change, but quietly. On Wednesday afternoon, when nothing much at all was happening in Washington, Conn., I wandered into the town hall and found a couple of guys getting married.
They stood in front of a bust of our first president, beneath a bright American flag and next to a bulletin board crowded with letters from men and women serving in Iraq and Afghanistan.
It was a moment remarkable because it was both simple and revolutionary. And in Connecticut I guess that's how change can happen. Steady and like a habit.
Two guys Joe Mustich and Ken Cornet forked over $30 and got married in town hall. Aside from a few friends who showed up, nobody much cared. No one wandered out from the town clerk's or first selectman's office. The resident trooper didn't show up. The Family Institute was nowhere to be seen.
The couple wore fleece and corduroy pants and drove up in a red Subaru and parked right out front. Ken had a red scarf. Joe looked like the guy who might talk your ear off while selling you a snow shovel across the street at the hardware store.
No rice. No show tunes. No hate. The couple held hands. Joe's mother, Lorraine, had a tear in her eye.
This morning I got up and watched on YouTube an entirely different scene unfolding on television reports from California, where change and gay marriage are now tearing that state apart.
I watched as an amped-up crowd in Palm Springs stamped and trampled a large cross that a 69-year-old woman was carrying. The demonstrators were angry over California voters' rejection of gay marriage. It was ugly.
"It didn't take long for that cross to be pulled from her hand," the news anchor reported. "There is a lot of anger and a lot of hate, quite honestly, on both sides."
This was the opposite of what I watched in Washington Wednesday afternoon.
If I had lingered in Town Clerk Sheila Anson's office, admiring the "Ye Olde Washington" quilt on the wall, I would have missed Ken and Joe's history-making wedding in a town where George Washington "breakfasted" back in 1781, 17 years after The Courant started publishing.
"Repeat the vows," Justice of the Peace Davyne Verstandig told the couple as she briskly went about her business out in the foyer. "By the law of Connecticut ... I pronounce you partners in life. You will leave now a married couple."
I stood next to a retired couple from Bethlehem who stopped by to watch.
Bob Dahlin and Chuck Hix — 46 years together — have thought about leaving Connecticut, but now, it seems, this is the place to be. They plan to marry next month.
"We are very proud to be Connecticut citizens," Hix told me. We joked about a new gay marriage industry that might take root here.
Already there's a call for a boycott of the Sundance Film Festival in Utah because of the Mormon Church's aggressive support of the California gay marriage ban. Gov. Rell should call Robert Redford immediately and offer Connecticut as a replacement — we're gay-friendly and there's already a 30 percent tax break for moviemaking.
"I am so grateful that Connecticut is one of the first states in the union to understand the true meaning of marriage," Cornet announced after they were married. "Thanks, everyone, especially Joe's parents for giving me this treasure."
Cornet, 67, and Mustich, 54, met 29 years ago on a late summer day on Fire Island.
Of course it was a surprise, Lorraine Mustich, married 57 years to her husband, Angelo, told me when I asked the obvious.
But, she explained, "It's my son. We love him."
"That's who he is."
Yeah, this is all surprising. But we're handling it fine. Quietly and steadily.
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