Wedded Bliss

We went to a wedding last weekend and it was beautiful.  The bridesmaids wore pink, the groomsmen even wore pink vests and pink roses and didn't complain, the mother of the bride looked young enough to be the bride herself, the bride was stunning in the dress her mother had worn twenty-five years ago at her own wedding, and the dad had to gulp back tears more than once during the ceremony.  He was the preacher, so it was kind of hard for him to get the words out looking at his precious daughter and probably remembering his lovely wife in that same dress and wondering where in the world did the years go. I loved it.

As far as I could tell, there were no glitches.  Well, at the end of the ceremony the preacher pretended to have second thoughts about the groom kissing his daughter, so at the last he said  "Austin, you may now...keep holding Hayley's hands."   Hayley, however, knew just what to do.  She grabbed hold of her new husband's shoulders and laid a big kiss on him even without her dad's permission.  It was very cute.

Weddings always fill me with nostalgia. You too, I'm guessing.  We have been to quite a lot over the years.  A few years ago it seemed like we were going to one every weekend.  All of our friends' kids and all of our kids' friends were getting married at the same time.  Every one was special even though they ran the gamut from very simple to wildly elaborate.  I don't even want to know what some of them cost.

There was an old saying that if something went wrong at the wedding it insured that the marriage would go well, and even though we didn't know details, like when you listen to a piano performance and the pianist later says "Oh, I missed so many notes!" and you didn't know the difference, probably there was at least some small thing that happened at each to dispel the hex.  The air conditioning went out at the church during our wedding. You can see Dennis kind of dripping in some of the pictures. The florist showed up minus a couple of corsages and look how long we've been married!

At one wedding we went to the bride and groom knocked over the unity candle, there was a small fire and I think the video made it onto America's Funniest Home Videos. How the "disasters" are handled by the bride and groom probably has much to say about how well their marriage will go.  (The fire people are still married and it has been about seventeen years, I think)

The way my daughter-in-law, Robyn, responded to what happened at her wedding was one of the things that convinced me she would be great in our family.  One of the candle lighters, her small cousin, was having difficulty lighting the last of the candelabras.  She tried and tried till finally one of the ushers went up and took the lighter from her and tried to light the candle. He knocked against it.  It swayed left.  It swayed right. It swayed backwards and forwards and he finally made a heroic grab and caught it at just the moment before it went down.  All this time the pianist, who it turned out was mainly fluent in "honky-tonk", kept playing the same song again and again that sounded like it had originated in an Old West saloon.  After the wedding when Robyn got someone to confess to why she had been made to stand behind the door to the sanctuary forever hearing the same tinkly song over and over, said "Oh, good!  I was hoping something funny would happen."

Because I was the preacher's daughter and impossibly cute and red-headed (I'm sure that was why!  My daddy said so.) I was the flower girl in a lot of weddings when I was little.  It didn't take long till I was an old pro at it and hated to be slowed down by unskilled kids who were poky ring bearers, or extra flower girls who took forever to learn that step-pause-step thing.  I knew just how to dole out the petals so I didn't run out before I got to the front of the church and heaven help the other kid who might hesitate in fright when she was supposed to start down the aisle. I could pinch. I think the last wedding I was flower girl in was when the other flower girl made it to the front with me dragging her, then turned and stage-whispered to her mother right in the middle of the ceremony, "I have to go potty!"  I gave up the profession; working with amateurs was just too stressful.

The Flower Girl and her Daddy, the preacher.

The preacher who performed his daughter's wedding last weekend has two more daughters to go.  You might think he will get tougher as he goes along, but since I remember when my dad performed my wedding (I was the last of four) I kind of doubt it.  And that is the way it should be.