It hasn’t been quite four months yet since we got married, but somehow I’d forgotten how huge it was already. As I sat in a 100 year old chapel in New Orleans this weekend, watching our friend (the friend we were closest to we got together, no less) say his vows, the enormity crashed over me again.
A few weeks before we got married we were sitting in our Rabbi’s office, talking about marriage, and I said something like, “I know, I know, marriage doesn’t change anything. Not really.” And she looked at me and said, “Well. It does. But that’s another story.” And as I listened to our friends say the bit about ‘for better and for worse, forsaking all others, as long as we both shall live,’ one grinning and one teary, I wondered how I’d ever thought that this moment wasn’t a game changer.
But if I learned one thing this weekend, it was that I think every wedding (and possibly every funeral) should end with a New Orleans jazz band playing As The Saints Go Marching In. Because standing on that sidewalk outside an old southern mansion, the whole crowd waving white napkins over our heads like flags, stomping our feet, singing that familiar spiritual at the top of our lungs, our voices rubbed raw from joy, throwing handfuls of lavender at the newlyweds as they rushed to the car? That was it. That’s why we go to weddings, I think, and that’s why we love weddings. Weddings help us to brush up against hope, and to remember how to believe.[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dMMtdVQLTpE] That, and they are a damn fine time. Congratulations you two. And many many happy years.
Oh! And I met a reader for the very first time. You should have seen my face when the woman in front of me in the drink line whipped around and said, “Um. Are you Meg from A Practical Wedding? Because you’re kind of totally famous.” (What?) And thank god she said hi, since she and her husband and *another* reader drank with us the rest of the night. Thanks guys!
