In the oldest post I created in my retroblogging on this site, the photo shows half a century ago a young (so young) wedding couple marching up the aisle of a church after their ceremony.
Both are barely out of their teens, about halfway through their 20th years. She is a classic, picture-perfect bride. The gauzy veil of childhood flipped back after that first kiss as a wife. Her delicate neck and collarbones in this setting not the gangly body of a teen kid, but a young woman’s beauty. The yards of white fabric of her gown requiring her to hold the skirt up with one hand, as the other, wedding ring on her finger, loops through my grinning father’s arm. The raised hem reveals the little white shoes. My father is dressed in a dark suit—the photo is black and white, so whether it is black or very dark is uncertain—with a small, precise bow tie and a light fluffy boutonniere. Formalwear worn with style. (And I think of this in contrast to the uniform of his later life, baseball hats, t-shirts, wood-stain-speckled jeans.) His smile glows. His hands are graceful. The picture-perfect groom.
It is a moment capturing having Done It Right.
I am in this picture, though you cannot see me. And that’s another part of doing it right; the ticking clock of my mother’s pregnancy. December wedding, July baby. The nick of time.
Around them are the beautiful lines of the church I knew from all my visits to my mother’s parents. That sweetly elegant little central valley Methodist church with its soaring arches. The heavy wooden pews, built to withstand a century of use. The thick padded carpets on the aisles. The choir loft above the entry so that the voices could emerge high above and behind you as you faced the altar.
I remember the shuffling of feet, the coughing, before and between the parts of the Sunday service. My child feet not reaching the floor. My wise and whimsical grandfather perhaps sliding me a couple 3″x5″ cards from his breast pocket and a little pencil from beside the offering envelopes in the pew-back holders. The music. The words of ritual. The simple, sweeping togetherness of the Doxology.
I do not recall ever believing in God, even as a child. But I dearly love many who do, and the lessons they shared with me both formally in church services and casually in daily life have been essential to my moral foundation. Do as you would be done by. Care for those who need. Work for peace. Recognize our shared humanity even in faces most different from your own. Do not hoard your blessings, but multiply them by letting them flow forth from you.
That sweet little church remains dear in my memories. Though I confess, part of its dearness is the exhilarating freedom I had in exploring it on non-service days as my grandparents performed various supportive tasks. Playing in the Sunday School rooms without any other person around. Finding all the doors between its various rooms upstairs and down in its U-shape, of which the church-proper was only one arm. Playing behind the closed curtain or out in the open, conditions depending, of the raised stage at the end of the big Community Hall. Running the Hall’s length to its big kitchen to check on whatever my grandparents and other volunteers were doing there. It was a thoroughly grand place to be an adventurous little kid.
There are other pictures in this oldest blog post. My mother in classic pose, veil down, bouquet in hands, skirts fluffed and arranged to maximum circumference. Her face is like a merged photo of a child and an adult. Lipstick lips and a strong jaw smiling below a button nose and wide eyes.
The two of them together. Happy and excited, but with some anxiety in their faces. The fingertips of my father’s left hand tucking into the front of his jacket as though he might have just checked his fly. Just in case. I see little of my grandmother in my mother’s face in this picture, but my father wears much of his own father’s look. That shadow was a hard one for him to grow up in; he dreaded turning into his father, and I wonder if the fear of that hindered him finding his own path. Worry that bogged him down so much it became self-fulfilling in some ways.
A photo of them by the cake—unflattering of my father, looking a bit like a mannequin as the camera catches him awkwardly; my mother, gracious, beautiful, perhaps slightly terrified. There is a plate of what I think are three rows of cookies—red, white, green—representing not Mexico or Italy but Christmastime.
The last has them surveying the piles of wrapped presents after a costume change which puts my father in a brown suit and a narrow blue tie and my mother in a chic pink skirt and tall collared jacket.
Here my brain sings “in my copy of a copy of a copy of Dior”, thanks to my mother’s commendable habit of playing good musicals on LP around our house when I was a child.
So there they are, the newly married couple, dressed to the nines, the Community Hall dimly visible behind them, stage curtains open. Here it begins. A direct line from a point below the hem of that perfect little jacket top of my mother’s dress suit to a child singing and telling stories to herself on that stage in an empty room years later.
And perhaps a straight line too, from a musical a couple years later, to my mother deciding a bit over half a decade later there’s gotta be something better than this and getting up getting out and living it.
Close the door then on the scene, with love and appreciation, and change that post to private. Eyes to the present happiness, hearts full.
MetaGrrrl 