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The bride finally arrived and emerged from a sleek car, darted across the lawn and vanished inside the Isom house as gracefully as streams of colored light through a dark-filled room.
It is a day a bride dreams of her entire life, and a day which any groom is constantly in marvel of. It is like a fairy tale. Nothing can go wrong, or at least shouldn’t. Everything had been discussed, everything has been planned out, taken care of, organized down to the last movement and word and crumb to be eaten. The aunts and uncles made sure of that. For two days they came, broiled and baked in the stifling Mississippi heat to set everything up. When Saturday came, it was 111 degrees and when everyone arrived that night it had cooled to a tepid 105. The caterer arrived on time and the flower truck pulled up in the drive and unloaded streams of color the hot afternoon could not dim. The bride’s mother darted from room to room checking on the progress of the punch preparation, the flower placement, the status of the bridesmaid’s dresses.
As for us married folks who have been through all this before, we go mostly for the food. Well... that’s not entirely true. Weddings have booze as well. Unless you happen to be in a dry county down south, and then it gets trucked in or “snuck” in, as we say in Mississippi. I have rarely been to a wedding that did not have such fare, and this wedding was one for the record.
We found the groom hiding in the back parlor and the married men descended upon him like vultures on a dying carcass in the desert. We smiled that smile only a man's memory can enliven in us as we watched the young man stand in jittered expectation of having to speak those vows that will sentence him to married life. He smiled at us. He denied he was nervous, of course. Each of us had already had several whiskeys by this point and were in a fine "groom harassment mode".
One of us looked down at the groom’s feet and smiled. “Yup”, he estimated, turning and tilting his head sideways. “Yer ankles should fit a nice BIG ball an’ chain!" After a few more exchanges and humorous jabs, we pulled out the heavy artillery and went on the attack.“Take my advice, son,” another man said, looking around the room cautiously. And then he yelled “RUN!” loud enough to make people out in the yard jump. Even the minister took a playful moment to dig his claws into the groom's skin just enough to make him bleed. in the back hallway after the ceremony had concluded, he clutched the groom's arm and whispered, “I haven’t signed the paper yet…" he said, his voice pumped up with feigned urgency and dread. "There’s still time to change your mind!”
We all laughed. Laughed hard, too. The groom even laughed. Nervously. It's what men do to other men to welcome them into the club we call "the old married men". Of course, the groom knew we were kidding. Or at least...we hoped he did.
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We all approved of the match years before we even knew they were thinking about marrying. Most of us had watched these two grow closer since the days when they met as students at Ole Miss and long before the willful groom created his signature publication, Y’all Magazine.
The personalities and dreams and passions that brought the bride and groom to last Saturday night at Isom Place could not help but pull the rest of us along with them as they went. Friends stick together, and in the South, that's standing in high cotton. For these two, filled with so much optimism and energy of youth, it was not only a beginning of a life together, but it was an illumination of two souls that gleamed as powerful and as brightly as if they had reached up and plucked a piece of the sun from the sky and brought it down for the rest of us to admire.
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"The preacher got right down to business, and it was over before you knew it. It was simple, elegant, sacred, reverent. It is all that need be said of it."
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Soon, we were asked to move outside to the back garden and take our seats. The heat had mercifully subsided from earlier in the day and a light breeze rose up as if the Lord himself smiled down upon the proceeding. A string quartet played Tschaikovsky and Pachelbel. Then the procession began. . .eight bridesmaids glided down the aisle one by one in ribboned smiles, swan-like, effortless it seemed as if across a mirrored lake, each clutching two fresh pink roses. In the South, older tradition holds that the groom asks his father to be the best man; and there they stood - father and son, each a monument and a care to the other, standing next to the preacher who stood holding his book amid the summer heat, waiting, smiling.
Soon she appeared. Necks cranes and whispers rippled through the crowd amid the rush of flashbulbs and clicks. She came forward, stepping purposefully with her father on her arm, resplendent in her long, white satin gown, smiling nervously, clutching her own bouquet of white and pink roses.
The preacher got right down to business and it was over before you knew it. It was simple, elegant, sacred, reverent. That is all that need be said of it.
[continued on PAGE 3]
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