Happy Anniversary

Thirty one years ago, I was left at my Mother-in-Law's house waiting for my groom and his best man to come back with the rabbi. This was a time of no cell phones, no personal computers in every home, and no way to know I'd be sitting here writing a blog about my daughter's wedding in the future. In fact, the elderly rabbi was waiting at a different corner than my soon to be husband thought, and so I wondered for awhile if I was to be left at the altar, so to speak. I spent my time sweeping leaves from around the pool since it looked like rain and all the wedding guests had retreated inside. I thought maybe the Pope really didn't forgive me for converting to Judaism; you start to hallucinate just a little before an event of such magnitude. And then they drove up! And the sun came out! And my brother made an inappropriate toast! My foster mother, the woman who had raised me in Victory Gardens, had suddenly died a few months before, which made the day bittersweet. I imagine it is this way for most brides, a little sweetness mixed with tears.

The invitations are in the mail. It's now occurring to me that I should make a checklist - if I had one, I could put a Big Check next to that one. My daughter and I had sent a flurry of emails back and forth about online wedding stationers. She and her fiancee finally picked the one with a little tree on top that looked like an apple tree. There was the big question of attire. Is it necessary to tell your guests what they are expected to wear to your wedding? Some said "Yes" but my oracle of all things wedding, MarthaStewart.com, said it was not necessary unless it was a black tie event. Even then, you say "Black Tie Optional." My girl over the years had participated in over the top, NYC black tie weddings and left coast cut-off jeans weddings on a beach...and the broad spectrum of everything in-between. She somehow thought people need to be told what not to wear! What I didn't get is that the invitation, by its very nature, is the first clue about your wedding. Will this be a formal affair, traditional with engraved lettering? Semi-formal, where just a part of the invitation is engraved? Or casual, like ours, designed and sent from the heart via internet and letterpress. The operative style for this wedding was going to be "rustic elegance." There is a word in Japanese that captures this essence, it means rustic and refined all at once. The word is somewhere in that book, "The Elegance of the Hedgehog."

I think I shocked my daughter when I told her that she and her betrothed could actually do the invitations. Somewhere I had read that this could be a bonding experience for the couple and give them shared ownership of the whole megilla; or the gansa megilla, which in Yiddish means the whole big fuss. There was a pregnant pause on the phone after I made my suggestion, I could hear her brain working over this idea through our wireless connection. "OK," she said very graciously. I told her all about the shelter animal stamps we could use that would benefit the ASPCA, and I even sent her the stamps. But, I later regretted this decision just a little, because when it came time to address the envelopes she was doing a rotation in the Pediatric ICU. This is the most intensely, emotionally hard field of medicine anyone ever invented. This is when you work for hours on a dying child, or you try and save a baby from SIDS; every day is a disaster with a young family that she would have to talk with about the possible outcome of their child's accident. But now the sun is shining, her PedsICU call shifts are over, and my invitation just might arrive today! On our wedding anniversary, a day I like to say we're still crazy about each other after all these years.

What is the secret to a happy marriage? Being available, listening, knowing that anything you say will be heard and has meaning to the other. But most of all, a sense of humor with some love thrown in. Marriage, it's not a bell curve, it's more like an EKG.