Love
We just got back from Pennsylvania. We were at a wedding, specifically, my nephew Evan’s wedding to a wonderful woman named Elizabeth. The eight members of my nuclear family survived eleven of the last thirty-two hours in a car. There were the urgent bathroom and Starbucks breaks, the frenzied scramble to maneuver into the E-Z Pass lane on the New Jersey Turnpike, and on our return trip, when we finally spilled out into lower Manhattan from the Holland Tunnel, the fact that we found ourselves joining the Gay Pride parade, but that stuff is fodder for a later snide post.
I know I’m not alone in enjoying weddings. What’s not to enjoy? It’s a chance to see your friends and family and generally everyone is in a festive mood. You dress up and drink and eat and dance. This wedding was no exception. The flowers, the dresses, the location: all were flat-out stunning. The weather behaved. The band was awesome. But these are just details.
My nephew Evan looks kind of like Jakob Dylan. He’s funny and brilliant and super tall. Elizabeth is dark-haired and gorgeous and, like Evan, funny and brilliant, but the thing that stands out most about her is the infectiousness of her smile. Again, though, these are just details..
What I am writing about doesn’t happen at every wedding. I can say this with some assurance because I’ve been to more than my share. It happened at this one just before Evan was about to recite the vows he’d written. He was facing Elizabeth, her hands in his, and he was looking into her eyes.
It was palpable. I could see it in Evan’s face, and in Elizabeth’s, and it hit everyone there with the force of a tsunami. Love. And while I know Evan has loved Elizabeth for a long time, and vice versa, love can mold itself almost seamlessly into the pattern of human existence. You don’t often find yourself having to confront love’s overwhelming enormity because it surrounds you, like mortar around bricks, rather than staring you in the face. But as we sat in the warmth of the afternoon sun on folding chairs, we saw Evan and Elizabeth acknowledge love, real and true, the forest we miss for the trees. It dwarfed the details. It was very nearly too exquisitely beautiful and wonderful to bear.