When our friend Rita Torcaso got married about a month ago – and what a spectacular wedding it was, in every way – she followed one bit of advice I gave her- a nice little touch which I remembered from a wedding back in Atlantic more than thirty years ago. The touch is this: at the end of the wedding, rather then leaving the parents sitting in the front pew while the bridal party files out (in effect leaving the parents sitting there a little bit like Day Old Bread) why not have the parents recess out right after the bride and groom – in more of a place of honor, and have the attendants file out after that? I loved it at Tressa Wilcox’s wedding back in Iowa and I thought it would be especially nice at Rita’s wedding since she had an enormous bridal party. (11 bridesmaids and 11 groomsmen. If the parents had been left sitting there while all of those attendants filed out, they would have had to wish Ben and Rita Happy Anniversary upon finally being able to greet and congratulate them.) So that’s what she decided to do – and for all I did at that wedding, musically, what I was most pleased about, weirdly enough, was that I had suggested this small but significant variation on the typical recessional – and that Ben and Rita chose to honor their parents in this way.
Anyway I think it was while we were on our way home from the wedding that a weird question popped into my head- – – Did we remember to do this for our own wedding 17 years ago? I could vividly remember talking about it 17 but I wasn’t absolutely certain that we remembered to make it happen -and neither was Kathy. (After all, we were on our way out the door in that moment and were actually the only people in the whole church who couldn’t see who walked out next.) I suppose we could have asked someone who was there, except that the only thing anybody tends to remember about our wedding is how close they came to suffering heart stroke. . . not the amazing music provided by two choirs plus several soloists, not the lovely sermon, not the musical program after the ceremony, nor anything about tuxes & dresses or our flowers, nor Sam Chell’s jazz combo at our reception, to say nothing of this matter of who processed out and in what order.
No, what everyone seems to remember about our wedding back on September 14th, 1991 is that it was HOT and MUGGY and our wedding was 90 minutes long. And I’m sure that by the time our recessional rolled around and Randy and the congregation started raising the roof with “Now thank we all our God” at least half the assembled congregation had collapsed from heat stroke – or from exhaustion, or from both – while those who were still alert enough to sing were thanking God more than anything for the fact that it was over at last.
So we were pretty much on our own to determine exactly who walked out when in our recessional, which prompted me to brave the basement and try to lay my hands on one of our wedding videos. (We had two complete videotapes made, from two different angles, although the one from the front of the church got accidentally bumped and shut off during communion by one of our groomsman – but I don’t want to embarrass Walter so I’m not going to mention which groomsman was responsible – but that made us so glad to have the other tape as well. There were at least two other people with their camcorders going, giving us four wedding videos in all. ( My word, with so many film cameras going, you would have thought it was the wedding of Jennifer Aniston and Brad Pitt. ) Anyway, I found the tape that I thought would most certainly answer our question. . . and indeed, we did indeed remember to have the parents file out after us, with Attendants following after. We forgot a lot, but we DID remember to do this. The tape doesn’t lie – not about that or about anything else. . .
Kathy and I were married in 1991, so needless to say we all look a whole lot younger there – more like teeny-boppers still borrowing their parents’ car than the late 20s/early 30s yuppies that we were. And it’s astonishing to see our flower girl and ring bearer, Erika Smith and Shawn Hermanns, who by now have either graduated from college or are half way there. In fact, Shawn now towers over us like the center on a basketball team. What happened to the little squirt on the screen? There’s a young-looking Polly – a young-looking Marshall – but my ageless father looks remarkably like he looks today. Honestly, at the rate he’s going he’ll live to be 110 and will probably help me move into a nursing home someday rather than the other way around! And there’s Pastor Sandy Roberts, who preached that day and who did our pre-marital counseling and, for some strange reason, didn’t try to talk Kathy out of this. Whew.
It is fun to see the array of friends and family with which we surrounded ourselves that day – and the people who were in the pews. This particular video was taken from the back balcony, so we are only seeing the backs of people’s heads- but one can still make out the unmistakable image of certain people who have since departed this earth – and of course, it is striking to see Kathy’s mom there- and the flowers on the altar in memory of my mom, who had already passed away several years earlier. For all the people who were with us that day, there certainly were people whose absence was acutely felt. But we wouldn’t miss them if we didn’t love them.
As I watched just a few minutes of the video, I remembered something which I had completely forgotten. . . that this video was done by one of Kathy’s colleagues at school – and it was the closest thing we were going to have to a professional video of the service. I can still remember eagerly popping the tape into the vcr for the first time, seeing about thirty seconds of the prelude – and then suddenly being jerked to the receiving line. . . with not a single second of the wedding itself. It was as though the camera operator had accidentally hit pause and not taped anything at all until it was all over and she had set up shop outside, filming us as we greeted our guests. I’d like to say that we shrugged our shoulders, cracked a joke or two, and went on with our lives – but I for one was CRUSHED. This felt like something straight out of the book of Job. ( At least I didn’t insist that everyone involved reassemble for a re-enactment of the event. ) Some months later, the woman who made the video for us was going through some tapes at home and came across an unlabeled tape- popped it into her VCR to see what it was – and discovered that it was our wedding! It turns out that she had used two tapes that day, but in the excitement of the moment had only given us Tape Two- not Tape One with the wedding itself. She was really ticked that we never said anything to her- but we honestly thought it was one of those technical misfires that was no one’s fault, totally unrepairable, and best left unreported.
Anyway, we ended up with our video after all – and over the years I have managed admirably to resist the urge to pop it on and watch it once a week for ten years straight, as I pretty much did with the video of Matt and Randi’s wedding. In fact, I’m pretty sure I’ve allowed five or six years to elapse since the last time I’ve watched any of our wedding videos. . . which for me is an eternity! I have no idea what that says about me or my marriage- except that perhaps I am beginning to rest more securely in the knowledge that Kathy Gall, for reasons which cannot be fully or easily explained, was just crazy enough to become my wife, knowing full well what nuttiness came with the deal. (And maybe for all those years when I would take out that video and watch it again and again, it was because I could scarcely believe my good fortune and that it had really happened.) And 17 years and many more grey hairs later, that partnership and friendship is the single most precious blessing in my life.