Wedding Day

Today is the day that my sister's youngest daughter, Jaclyn, is getting married. I know she will be a beautiful bride because she is a beautiful girl. Her sisters were beautiful brides; her mother was a beautiful bride. Today I'm not there and it breaks my heart, but the bigger heartache is that the most important woman at a wedding, other than the bride, is the bride's mother, and today, the bride's mother will not be there- at least, the guests will not see her there. I know she is there of course, sitting next to the love of her life in the front pew. Smiling at her daughter and offering words of encouragement. Laughing at the antics of her grandchildren. Filled with pride for Jennifer and Kelly, sisters of the bride, also trying to fill in as mothers of the bride. I think she probably can't stop smiling. Selfishly, I hope she is not too disappointed in me for not being there. I think she would understand. We are cut from the same cloth. Today is Jaclyn's wedding day! So I am reminded of another wedding day, Barbara's wedding day. I remember only a little... my mother planning and saving for months....buying the wedding gown- when everyone else was wearing big, full, flowing wedding dresses, my sister chose a sleek, flattering sheath with a long train, only someone with her figure could wear. I remember her taking me to the hair stylist, where they made me look like a 40 year old woman. (I was 14 and wanted to look like Cher. Barb was really mad at me when I washed all the hairspray out.) I remember her getting dressed in the basement of our church in Flossmoor, Illinois- the dress had about a hundred tiny buttons down the back and down the sleeves! What I remember most is seeing her start down the aisle on our father's arm; her beauty was ethereal, everyone literally gasped when they saw her. No princess or movie star could look as beautiful as my sister looked at that moment. And then I started to cry- it suddenly dawned on me that she was leaving home and not coming back. They would live on Long Island, near her new husband's home town. I guess I was making too much noise because the groom's sister, next to me in the wedding party, kept trying to tell me to "shoosh!" Then everyone started giggling and she pointed to the bride and groom, kneeling at the alter: someone had painted the words 'HELP ME' on the bottoms of the groom's shoes. I stopped crying and started laughing.

Jaclyn, I hope you have lots of laughter at your wedding, and no crying. If you and Joe love each other even half as much as your mom and dad loved each other, you'll have a very happy life together. And if you do even half as good a job at raising your children as they did, some day you and Joe will watch your children get married, and enjoy the same pride and delight that your mom and dad share today.

Pennsylvania Snow

Pennsylvania gets a lot of snow, but I've heard that the most memorable snow was the "big snowstorm" of Thanksgiving, '47. As I remember the story, one day it was a beautiful, sunny, crisp autumn and the next day the earth was covered in three feet of snow. It was Thanksgiving, and the roadside cabins my parents rented to travelers were empty. Service stations (including their tiny service station) and county offices were closed, so the highways remained impassible. Early that morning, my mother was surprised to see four young men trudging through the snowdrifts, headed for her front door. They were tourists from Italy on an American cross-country adventure, and they had spent the night huddled in their car. My mother invited them in to get warm and have some coffee and breakfast. With heavily accented and broken English they explained that they had been traveling west when they were caught off guard by the sudden snowstorm. They had been searching for a place to spend the night and wait out the storm when their car skidded off the road in the dark. My mother opened two cabins, dressed the beds in fresh linens, and lit the pot-bellied wood stoves. Then she invited the Italians to come up to the house for meals, until the plow came by and the tow-truck could pull their car out of the snowdrift. My mother remembers this as her favorite Thanksgiving, she and my father and their two small daughters sharing our American traditions with the Italians. The Italians exclaimed over the turkey, the dressing, the pies...she graciously accepted their praise. But, there was one dish they wouldn't touch, no matter how much she coaxed. The jellied cranberry sauce, pushed out of a can and sliced onto a plate, caused them to react with fear and disgust. Later in the day my father was able to discern that they had believed the dish to be slices of congealed blood. Of course, my dad thought this was hilarious, and we heard the story repeated every Thanksgiving.
The next day the snowplows came by, and afterward the tow-truck came to pull the Italians' car out of the snow and out to the State Highway. The Italians waved good-bye to my mother and her little family, leaving Thanksgiving memories and a seedling of family lore.