I’ve just arrived home from my niece’s wedding in Utah, where the bride and groom spoke of their love for each other under pine-scented air with majestic mountains all around us. There were small touches the crowd couldn’t see, such as the tiny framed photos attached to the wedding attendents’ flowers of the grandparents’ marriages, three of them having passed away before this grand day.
This touching celebration made me flashback to her youth and my son’s, their escapades in the sandbox, water rocket bottle launches, Marco Polo water games in the pool.
Then I flashed back to my own wedding, which didn’t flow as smoothly as this one. Mine began on a sweltering June day in Fresno (111 degrees) with the cake lady calling to report the frosting wouldn’t stick on the cake. What should she do? Maybe I shouldn’t have saved quite so much money after all, and gone with a professional baker . . . Next, after seeing the priest briefly at the church, my friend who played the piano, asked when she should begin.
“The wedding starts at ten, so begin at ten,” I said. Hey. I’m from the Midwest. We are prompt. What I didn’t know is that California time begins much later than universal time.
The music began and so did we. And there we stood, at the altar, waiting for the priest to appear. We waited. And waited. Where was he? In the bathroom? Ten minutes slowly ticked by. We thought we’d have to get a friend to be a stand-in when he finally rushed on to the scene.
My Uncle Arnold, a sign-painter by trade, couldn’t travel to the wedding, but he made us a lovely sign which we put in the back of our car’s window. After the ceremony and on the way to the reception across town, the sign fell down. At a stoplight, a friend in the car next to us, opened my door to our two-seater car, pushed my seat forward, and leaned over to straighten the sign. The light turned green and he slammed the door shut. Problem was, I held on to the door’s frame when he pushed me forward.
He jumped back into his car before he noticed my hand protruding outside the closed-door, and me with my mouth open, uttering sounds.
“What’s wrong?” asked my new husband.
“Uh, ug, uh,” I said which I thought were intelligible words.
I cradled my swollen hand and refused the idea of an emergency room visit. Fortunately, one of my bridesmaids was a nurse and knew my hand wasn’t broken, just bruised. All the pictures show me with one hand behind my back.
The best man was so nervous he spilled wine on my dress twice – – red and white. He shook so much before the wedding I promised him he wouldn’t be the one married that day.
And our photographer friend, employed by a newspaper, used different film he had never used before. Only one photo came out that day. Fortunately, we had other friends taking pictures so we did have some for our scrapbook. And we did have memories, didn’t we? Fortunately, compared to the wedding, the marriage has been a piece of cake.
Writing Prompts:
1. Write about a major celebration in your life. What memories made lasting impressions upon you? Others?
2. Using a character from a current writing project, create a wedding scene. Throw in a major or minor conflict. What happens? Make your reader cry or laugh or both.
3. Use the theme of a wedding to create a poem, song or another work of art.
4. Write about your wedding or a wedding you have attended. What made an impression upon you?
which left her unable to walk, talk or perform basic human tasks and was sent to rural Wisconsin to a Catholic run home for the mentally disabled. There she was looked after for 35 years by Sister Paulus Koehler, the authors aunt. The Missing Kennedy is an insightful, important and poignant memoir that chronicles Rose’s life and includes many never-before-seen private photos, Kennedy quotes from the author’s interviews, and anecdotes about Rosemary and her famous family.
