After seven years in Manhattan, and decades of being single, I married Peter in the living room of the 1939 Sears-kit cabin he'd bought upstate. He'd badgered me for a couple of months because I was about to agree to marry someone else and I guess I became like a rare Mickey Mantle memorabilium or 1927 first pressing of Hoagy's Gennett Records
"Star Dust" with Hoagy's own band. Collector's obsession had more to do with Peter's hot pursuit than any particular charm of mine. I succumbed on the Saturday after Thanksgiving, our "yesiversary," but chose the following Friday for our wedding day because my Parisian friend Marie-Theres would be in New York. When I phoned Susan and John on Monday, they said, with not a yoctosecond of hesitation, they'd come. I'd been Susan's maid of honor, and she'd be my matron of honor, and I wore what was already called "my wedding dress," new for my role in Susan and John's wedding and then worn again to the weddings of Marie-Theres and Roland and of my other best friends in Paris, Susan and Yves. So this would be its fourth wedding and my first.
Susan and John got up at five in the morning and were at the cabin by 9:30--we were still in our PJs, planning our ceremony over breakfast with Marie-Theres and her old friend Bill and my old teaching friend from Boston, Edgar, an ordained minister who "
studied with Reinhold Neibuhr at Union Theological Seminary," and lest we doubt, brought along his diploma. Susan noticed my nightgown was on inside-out. After breakfast, Marie-Theres and Bill, both artists, took the flowers and oysters and champagne we'd brought up from Manhattan with us the night before and arranged a beautiful table, and hilarity was abundant, especially after we took our vows, when Peter put the needle on the turntable and played Fred Astaire's
"I'm Putting All My Eggs in One Basket." Having Susan and John there was, though, priceless.
Their round-trip drive was about twenty minutes longer each way than the drive to Susan's birthday party this Sunday. Not in thunder-stormy end-of-4th-of-July-weekend traffic, but that's kind of niggling, isn't it. Of course I was present, all the way from Paris, for their wedding--which I wouldn't have missed for the world.
