Marry in Blue

I love weddings—the processional march by Mendelssohn, the hush before the bride comes, her radiance lighting up the faces of the congregants like so many votive candles, the readings about life being empty without love, the sober exchange of vows, the first kiss, Purcell’s Trumpet Tune recessional to joyful applause. All weddings move me, but those where the bride and groom are no longer young, where the bride moves slowly down the aisle on her son’s arm and where the groom combs back gray hair with gnarled hands before taking gold bands from a dimpled grandson, well, these weddings touch me because they prove that hope never ends, that even the old can be surprised by joy.

“If you are present for one moment,” said the fiftyish bride quoting Nietzsche to her fiftyish groom in the musty nave of the 18th century Unitarian Universalist Church in Boston, “then you are present for your entire life.”

I knew the bride in another life when we were both married to first husbands. We met in a suburban New York writing group, responding to an ad in our local newspaper. We appeared to have little in common, save the coincidence that our husbands were both named Leonard. She had three children under the age of 10, and had dropped out of college to get married; I had a Master’s Degree, no children, and was a veteran of several serious relationships. Raised in upstate New York, her parents were first-generation Polish-American immigrants; I grew up in western Massachusetts, and my ancestors were buried in my hometown cemetery.

And yet, in the deepest strata of our being, we had everything in common. We both lacked confidence and felt unfinished, hiding behind our stronger, surer Leonards, struggling to sculpt ourselves into form, like Michelangelo’s slaves emerging from slabs of Carrara marble. I remember one poem she wrote back then that took the top of my head off (Emily Dickinson’s description of what a poem should do): It was about her mikva, the ritual bath Jewish women undergo during menstruation or after childbirth as well as before converting to Judaism. She described the fear and humiliation of taking off her clothes in a public bath somewhere deep in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn, other older women coolly appraising her breasts and buttocks, a rabbi chanting Hebrew after she emerged from the rainwater-filled pool--all these creepy rites of an ancient religion wordlessly endured in order to please the observant Jewish family of her husband-to-be.

Time passed, bringing changes to our lives as wives. My Leonard died of brain cancer, hers got a job in Dallas; she moved to Texas; I moved to Illinois. She and I lost track of one another, and yet moved in tandem paths of individuation, engaged in the long, slow work of finishing ourselves.

Then one day, as if it were happening in the surreal, non-sequent blue of a dream, I got a phone call at the Vermont Studio Center, where I was working as a grants and publicity writer. It was my friend, whom I hadn’t seen in fifteen years, tracking me down on Google. We talked for close to an hour. She said she was divorced, living in Boston, running a successful design business, her children married with children of their own. I fast-forwarded through my own changes: how I had remarried and had a son, how I had published a book about the first year of my widowhood. More e-mails and phone calls followed; she tracked down my memoir in a second-hand bookshop, read it and wrote me a loving, generous e-mail response.

We both moved again (we also have this in common, a passion for upending our lives), but this time we kept in touch, managed to meet in the Pioneer Valley (remarkably, we looked the same, if a bit rounder and blonder), took walks along the Connecticut River where we recalled funny stories about our Leonards (mine, a proud Leftist as well as an irreverent jokester, called hers, a serious Republican and high-earning exec in a soft drinks corporation, a ‘soda jerk,’ which everyone but her Leonard found hysterically funny). Then one day, one of her long e-mails appeared in my in-box with gob smacking news: she had met someone on Craigslist.

Apparently, she had posted an ad in the personals section in which she stated that she was looking for a serious relationship. But here’s what singled her ad out from all the others blathering on about sunsets and long walks on the beach: she wanted a guy who knew Mark Strand (note bene, all those who are looking for love in the personals—it’s quirky details like these that will lead you to your soul mate). Within days, she had conjured up her Strandophile: he was a divorced journalist and artist who lived in the Greater Boston area. After many meetings--virtual and actual--they got married in the UU church in Jamaica Plain on the first day of summer.

In the ceremony, which was attended by a small circle of relatives and friends (including this happy blogger), the bride and groom read each other poems they had written (hers was a list of the ten things she loved about him and began with, "I love how you always listen to me even when the Red Sox are on TV"). The groom read a similarly sweet poem about her, and before the kiss (billed on their wedding program as ‘the opening kiss’) read a letter from Mark Strand himself, sending his congratulations.

But one of the best things about the wedding—at least for this aficionado of all things blue--was that the bride wore a brilliant turquoise shawl over her white cotton gown. Perhaps she only wore it because it was drafty in the church or because she felt self-conscious in her low-cut dress. Or maybe she was fulfilling that most ancient of bridal superstitions about wearing “something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue, and a silver sixpence in her shoe.” Whatever the reason, the turquoise shawl, which connected this grandmotherly bride to generations of brides all the way back to Roman times who married in blue because they believed it was the color of fidelity (“Marry in Blue/Lover be True” opines one proverb)—this shock of turquoise glowing like a cluster of semi-precious stones deep in the mine of the pre-revolutionary church, gave me a little thrill, and when I hugged my friend after the ceremony, I cried, “You wore blue!”

I raise a cyber-glass to this blue bride and her groom. May they love long and well.