The Big Day

     I’ve been checking the weather so obsessively it’s a shame that the Weather Channel app doesn’t provide rewards points. 

XXXs and OOOs

My husband and I had arrived at an acquaintance's home and there was the usual flurry of hugs and kisses.

Mazel Tov!

         In spite of knowing exactly two people (mom and dad of the bride) at this weekend’s wedding, we had a delightful evening. It took place on a breezy warm summer evening at a restaurant on the edge of the water in Westport Connecticut. We really enjoyed how different this Jewish service was from previous weddings we’ve been to. I learned later that depending on whether the couple is Orthodox or Conservative or some other denomination, the family has a fair amount of latitude to incorporate whichever cultural and spiritual elements they wish. 

          First of all, it was a small wedding, certainly under 100 people. We arrived and were guided around the building to where chairs were set up on the lawn facing a simple chuppah, a canopy supported by four poles, which in a Jewish ceremony symbolizes the home the couple will build together. What a lovely idea. 

          The other ladies and I did our part to help out the facility’s groundspeople as we aerated the lawn with every step of our heels. There’s a real art to getting across a spongy lawn in heels – if you’re not careful, your heel will plunge down into the soft earth, tipping you back and then requiring you to yank up your foot like a toilet plunger. A useful workout for the calves. 

          Once we were settled in our white chairs facing the bay, we all stood up as the parents of the bride both escorted her together to meet her waiting groom. Instead of being shuffled off to sit with everyone else, both parents – and the mother of the groom – stood with the couple throughout the ceremony. 

          I was unable to see much since we were in the very back, but I could make out the bride circling the groom several times. I did a little research and learned that this is to symbolize righteousness, kindness, and justice, the virtues of marriage. There was also general laughter when the rabbi instructed the groom to break the glass, saying it would be the last time he’d be able to put his foot down. Before long the ceremony was over and we all called Mazel Tov! 

          We nibbled appetizers while looking out over the sunny bay but then grabbed our drinks and headed inside as a storm swept toward us. Before too long we all found our tables and were chatting with our dinner companions when the DJ struck up Hava Nagila and the entire room piled onto the dance floor. People sang and circled in the Horah left and right and back and forth regardless of age or talent. They had the stupid Electric Slide and Chicken Dance beaten by a mile.

          There was the usual dinner and speeches, but then before I knew it, the bride and groom were on chairs, hoisted up and danced around the room, as were the parents of the bride. 

          This was one fun evening. I may begin a new career crashing Jewish weddings.

Scariest Halloween E v e r

There I was, in Waynesville Missouri, only one month into post-teenagerdom, and any family I had was five states away. It was Halloween and I was alone in a motel room and there was a knock on my door.

Surface Knowledge

When you grow up with something, you tend not to think too much about it. It's just there, like your family's weird fondness for peanut butter, lettuce, and mayonnaise sandwiches or my grandfather’s kindness and my uncle’s polio.

I can't remember a childhood summer that didn't involve water in some way. Mama would pack us up in the car and off we'd go almost every day to one Northern Virginia pool or another. Or even better, we might spend a few blissful weeks visiting the Connecticut aunts - Aunt Dotty at Uncas on Thames or Aunt Nell in Madison. Often my mother's brother, Uncle Sam, would be visiting. He and my mother were both excellent swimmers, with an effortless freestyle stroke, cutting through the water, arms rotating as regularly as a paddle wheel, heads rising for air.

There was a reason for their expertise.  Both of them had contracted polio when they were young.  My mother bore little evidence of it, aside from possibly shortened stature, but my uncle was - as they would have said in the 1930s - severely crippled. Swimming had been an important part of his therapy and as a result, they both became adept in the water.

As a child I gave no thought to Uncle Sam's appearance or how his much smaller left leg looked below his swimsuit when he was there on the beach with us.  I was just glad he was visiting - in spite of being single, he always brought my sister and me the best gifts.  Yes, he walked differently, his hips rotating with each step, the delayed swing of his weaker leg. But that was Uncle Sam. It was what made him who he was, just like the occasional ear-shattering shriek of my grandmother's hearing aid was a part of her.    

His was not an easy childhood; most of it was filled with painful operation after operation, followed by months in bed. He did become so proficient at knitting that as an adult he made all his own argyle socks, and I'm sure the hours spent reading were a factor in his becoming an English professor.

Like everything else I never questioned or thought too deeply about, his father was just my grandfather, the kind retired geologist poring over oil leases in his retirement, or the person who told me pixies really did live in the shade garden under the big magnolia. I gave no more thought to my grandfather’s inner life than I did to those pixies.

Before Uncle Sam died I said something to the effect that wasn’t it wonderful how determined his father must have been, trying to conquer this horrific disease with all those operations.

Uncle Sam just looked at me with a jaundiced eye.

That adult moment with my uncle suddenly made me wonder exactly who my grandfather did it for. 

R.I.P.

Satchel

1997 - 2014

Bitter Attraction

Here's my latest contribution to 
Five Sentence Fiction


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Lillie McFerrin Writes

This week's topic is  Frozen

Their lips met before Janie and Christopher even knew each other.

Going the Distance

     This week's prompt is

     Limitless       


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My apologies for crossing the line into non-fiction.
This entry is dedicated to Dick and Rick Hoyt.

No “vegetable”, he was in there; the nurses and the doctors didn’t see him, but his parents did.