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Going
to the Chapel
Maybe
it’s the humidity—short-circuiting the motherboards, triggering
relays to the biological clocks or something—but among my
peers it’s wedding season. And, despite some pronounced personal
misgivings about the institution, it turns out that my cynicism
may have faultlines. True, a struggling journalist can never
have too many complimentary buffets or open bars in his life,
but for a moment it seemed like there might be more to it
than that.
The most recent wedding I attended, that of a grade-school
friend with whom I also roomed for a while when we were both
half-hearted undergrads, was a pleasant and traditional affair:
white dress and black tux, church, biblical readings, banquet-hall
reception with DJ. Rather than the standard stretch, the limo
that delivered the bride and her maids was a block-long assault
vehicle, but otherwise the component parts were all in place
in recognizable form. I am, myself, however, no great lover
of ritual, and there were some things about the ceremony that
I couldn’t help but note as mildly disconcerting:
First, stranger as I am to the ways of Catholicism, I was
struck by the incongruity between the earnestness of the promises
made and the (let’s face it) falseness of the iconography
amid which they were made. In short, the whiter-than-white
Christ-child figurines on either side of the altar, each working
a distinctly Western European medievalist look complete with
auburn pageboy ’do, kind of freaked me out. I don’t know.
Maybe it’s just me: Maybe this is just an expression of a
newish father’s neurotic fear of the very concept of an all-powerful
Caucasian infant, but for a non-believer, the historical inaccuracy
of the symbols sets a shaky tone. And, of course, you misogynists
and ball-and-chainers can fill in your own cynical quips about
the appropriateness of getting hitched beneath a statuette
of a man cruelly hammered to a cross.
The vogue for wedding readings among my crowd of lapsed this-and-thats,
recovering such-and-suches, agnostics, apostates, atheists,
free-thinkers and freaks has settled into the multi-culti
anthropological (Native American passages score high) and/or
the playfully poetic (ee cummings sets a nice tone). So, I
was a little unprepared for the Genesis. (If any of my crowd
happens to be reading this: Not Gabriel-era Genesis. Or, rather
not Peter Gabriel-era Genesis.) I guess I just thought
that the anxieties already on the minds of a marrying couple
might be sufficient without reminding them that they are to
be masters of the beasts and the fish and the fowl, and so
on. C’mon, give the kids a break. Least till they get back
from Bermuda. From what I gather, somebody else is on the
hook for wrangling the insects—which is a bitch of
a job—but, still.
That said, it was a quaint and modest church in a picturesque,
tree-thick village in Columbia County on a summer day so gorgeous
it could have been whipped up by the chamber of commerce for
tourist brochures. The minister was an assuring and gentle
presence—he looked like an ecclesiastical Fred Rogers—and
the good-will of the guests was palpable. It was, for the
day, anyway, a community gathered to witness, verify and welcome
a new union. At my most rock-hearted, I’d be hard-pressed
not to respond. It was an almost tidal tug at emotion.
Now, it’s been a long time since I was an even peripheral
member of that group. Grade-school was eons ago, and the undergraduate
years were spent in a terrarium of lecture and beverage centers.
I was included in the wedding by the groom’s choice as sort
of a director’s-cut version of his life, and probably made
little sense to some of the viewers. The groom’s mom and brothers
didn’t recognize me at first—and the vast bulk of the 250
or so people wouldn’t have known me from Adam (whom, I gather,
they actually know pretty well). So, my sense of the solidity
of this community was necessarily part fiction. For all I
knew, it might have dispelled as the congregants spilled out
the center aisle onto the lawn, shaking hands down the reception
line on the way to cigarettes and AC.
At the reception though, I was seated with one of the groom’s
former coworkers and his family. Husband and wife and their
four kids had slogged up from North Carolina—more than 10
hours—just to make the wedding. And this family’s collective
charm nearly killed me.
Maybe there was some element of Yankee snobbery in my appreciation
of Daddy’s references to his son as “mah boy” and to his wife
as his children’s “maw-ma”—but I don’t think so. They were
just so freaking nice. They were warm and funny, in general
and with one another. They touched each other easily, affectionately
and often. The eldest, a 15-year-old Christina Applegate doppelganger,
had the most exquisitely bored expression I’ve ever seen,
but she lit up with laughter when her mom playfully recalled
the teenager’s exasperated reaction to the announcement of
the youngest’s impending arrival: “Maw-ma, don’ you an’ Daddy
know ana-thing at all ’bout birth control?”
That tide of family-feeling that I felt building at the church
was at full flow. But when the married couples were solicited
by the DJ to hit the floor, Daddy moved to the bar while his
wife sat at the table clapping alone to the strains of the
Village People’s “YMCA.”
“Are
you crazy? Dance with your wife, man,” I thought in strained
incredulity. “For God’s sake, you lucky sonavabitch, dance
with your wife.”
But it was late and, if not for the 40-minute drive ahead
of me, I might have been at the bar myself. Maybe it wasn’t
all that important. Maybe it was just the humidity that had
gotten to me. I hit County Route 9 and the AC, and soon enough
felt like myself again.
—John
Rodat
jrodat@metroland.net
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