Vineyard Wedding

On Saturday afternoon Kathy and I drove out into the country to a vineyard where our friends’ daughter was being married. It was the strangest wedding we’d ever witnessed. To begin with, the bride and her father appeared walking over the hill between the lines of trellises down to a sort of arch way of woven branches (I tried not to think ‘Blair Witch Project’, I really did).

The minister was a woman who made various signs with her hands—almost a sign of the cross but not quite, along with pronouncements about the sanctity of marriage (this is called foreshadowing—see my conversation with her below). She did say one thing that stuck with me: something about how over the years the annoying things about your partner become “endearing”.

There were several readings: one from the Tao and a couple I couldn’t quite catch. The bride’s father, a staunch Catholic guy, recited a sonnet from memory. All the readings blathered on about love and stuff like that, which was fine. Periodically a woman dressed all in black with a 1930’s hat perched on her head stood up to sing various selections. One was in French, another was in Italian and the third again I couldn’t quite catch. Mind you, we had no scorecards to tell us who was on first. There was no best man, but rather a woman who happened to be a lesbian served as “best person”.

The bride and groom said some things to each other that no one could hear, they exchanged rings, looked expectantly at the minister, unsure as to whether they were done or not, and kissed exuberantly at the end. It was a brilliant sunny day in the fifties, and there was a tent sent up with rows of tables and chairs inside, a DJ, and about a hundred people milling around after the ceremony. There was no formal cutting of the cake because the “cake” consisted of tiers of Krispy Kreme doughnuts. If you wanted a piece of the wedding cake, you simply grabbed a donut. Appetizers and wine flowed freely and after about three hours we were ready to leave. The sun was sliding behind the trees, the temperature was dipping with it, and we didn’t want to be driving around the countryside in the dark. Our hosts said, “Wait—the food is coming out!” It took three hours to get to the food? We made our excuses and slipped away.

It was something of an artsy fartsy crowd, since both bride and groom are creative types. He seems to be vaguely employed, with dreams of doing something with wind turbines in California. The poor guy had injured his foot and wore dress shoes for the ceremony but switched to one of those big Velcro shoes later. He had to trudge through the vineyard with a cane on that bad hoof. Kathy had a chance to catch up with the mother of the bride, and I walked around and met some interesting people.

One of the bride’s brothers had a girlfriend who had gone to the same college as I had, so we talked about that for a while. She told me she is now a “life coach”. I thought to myself: you’re 28. What do you know about life? Come back in thirty years and we’ll talk. They live in California, though, so that makes all the difference. Another couple consisted of a cabinetmaker and an artist of some sort. I also talked to the minister and her husband (second marriage for them both). She wanted to talk about the gender of God. I edged away toward the hors d'oeuvres.