My baby girl is getting married this weekend and I just can’t believe it. Eight months or so of furious planning and here we are. Your mind flashes back to the first time you laid eyes on her in this world, that sweet, cooing little baby, all those ensuing years of her calling for you and needing you, and now, she will still need you but in a different way. (You hope.) Her years of dating angst are officially over, she will be someone’s next of kin and, for the first time in her life, that won’t be me.
Though she has not lived at home for a while now and is her own woman with her chosen career and life, there’s something about the marriage thing that makes you stop in your tracks. Your first thought is, “I must be older than I thought.” Closely followed swiftly by “I’m so happy and excited for them,” backed up again by “I am really old.” I recall very clearly my mother at my second wedding (she wore black to my first one — surely a premonition of things to come), with her butterfly tattoo (fake) on the arm, her orange dress (she never wore dresses) and her sneakers with orange laces (she always wore sneakers). She was so very happy that day. There are many people in those images from that Capitola cliff top that are no longer with us, but you remember they were there that day, immortalized. Their smiling faces are preserved by old color prints and bits of hazy video. Special times and forever memories. Family history for the generations to come.
And here we are, on the day of the wedding rehearsal for our girl and her lovely man. Eight months went by like a flash. We will soon be gathered under the wide old oaks on the blissful cliff of the Arroyo Seco gorge with people who are traveling from very far away to celebrate the happy couple and how special is that! For those who can’t make it, a few words are sent from overseas, cards, cash, gifts and the like. There will be a videographer present, a photographer, even a drone — apparently — to frame forever these very precious times, just as we did on our wedding day, and many before us and since.
Fortunately — ahem — our boys and their wives chose the simpler marriage route — one got married just the two of them in Las Vegas with a party later at home, the other went to the courthouse in Sacramento and then enjoyed a nice dinner, just them all alone, with no fanfare that the rest of us needed to be involved in. At the time we felt a little cheated that we didn’t get to witness their unique gatherings. But I get it now. I have a much better understanding these days for folk who flee their homes for faraway destinations to tie the knot — a “destination wedding,” as they are familiarly known, with only a small cluster of privileged peeps in attendance who can take the time off and afford the airfare.
When you have a girl though, apparently things can be a little different and our girl wanted the full-on fairytale affair. I guess we should feel fortunate that she didn’t want a Cinderella carriage or six white horses, but she did want a lot, even for a small wedding! The details embroiled in a “small” wedding are quite something and sometimes I thought my head was going to explode, even though she and her fiancé took care of the majority of the imaginative creations they wanted present on their happy day, and it was glorious to bear witness to the love and imagination present in everything they built.
But we all made it through to the end, as they say — we funded the lot, thanks dad — and here we are gathered together and ready to celebrate our daughter’s wedding to a very lovely man who has the ability — we’ve seen it — to talk her down from the tallest tree.
“I want it to be perfect!” she barked as I inadvertently commented that it would all be fine on the day. “I should have got a wedding coordinator!” (Oh, you mean, spending another $15K?) And these things never quite go off without a glitch, do they. I remember my wedding cake was extremely late arriving, to the point that we almost forgot about it. Sometimes I think the glitches are the whole point, because life is never perfect and we have to stumble over the blocks that arise and find a way through the storm regardless, and then accept that that is just part of the rich fabric of life. So, I wonder what glitches shall arise at this wedding that we will recall with such fondness 30 years down the road, those of us who are still here.
And now the wedding is in our rear-view mirror, and we are all on a bit of a timeout from each other, food, drink and life itself. I just need to unpack my copiously stuffed bags from the long weekend of wedding-dom and sit quietly with my puppies in my own little world. I need to sleep for three days straight. I need to reflect on all that happened these last few days — the lost luggage, the angry words, the dogs that didn’t run down the aisle as planned, the extra guests ad infinitum, the no shows, the mini-van that got stuck in the ditch, the mean relative, the $800 frozen cake, the annoying drunks and all the rest in between. I need to enjoy all those precious moments now frozen in time and count all our copious blessings of family, friends and others we didn’t know who came together to celebrate two very happy love birds on the most beautiful cliff top in Arroyo Seco.
My cup runneth over, as my mother would fondly say, though I think mine is a bit too full and I need to stop and meditate for a good while, listen to the birds and pet my animals.
