There Goes Our Baby

Walking onto the wedding site I’m struck by the sense of happy commotion, energized folk crisscrossing the rural property with buoyant industry, faces prone with unconscious half-smiles as they each set to the task at hand. These striding busy bees wear a variety of tats, indelible ink mostly dedicated to soft-spoken renderings of the plant kingdom, and I don’t mean jazz cabbage. 

Vines and leaves and branches make for striking statements when the object is not to swaggeringly adorn but to venerate. The vibe is pure uplift. An unnamable lightness suffuses and pulls at the edges of the scene when a sudden breach in the crowd frames two flayed and skewered lamb carcasses, bound to the earth with sticks and rearing back to hoist skinned limbs skyward in an ecstatic gesture of seeming celebration –  in any other setting a Blair Witch Hallmark card. Hoo boy. “I thought this was a vegetarian affair,” I murmur in mild shock to a passing guest. “It’s vegan, actually,” she counters with a crooked grin.  

At the feast later in the day the head chef will movingly describe the transmutation of these truly loved animals into a sating, conjoining gift of nourishment. The ceremony itself, those sanctified moments beneath a makeshift proscenium heavy with clustered marigolds, will be a sunburst – a benign cosmic explosion. The fancy space rays (excuse me) that typify a blossoming supernova will radiate out from the flower-swaddled altar to buffet the congregation on their wooden benches, joining us in the lovestruck couple’s self-made sacrament. 

Not so fast. 

Preceding all this organic woodland joy

Preceding all this organic woodland joy is the shuddering, rivet-weakened fuselage we’re obliged to strap ourselves into. We’re traveling from our hometown of Santa Barbara to Portland, Oregon for the lovefest, you see. As usual, Santa Barbara Airport’s unnerving “18th Century Adobe” motif charmingly suits the historical provenance of our onetime village in New Spain, but does little to invoke the promise of tech infallibility the jittery flyer desperately seeks in these moments. My wife and wisecracking grown kids exit the terminal of sun-bleached clay, walk across the tarmac and climb actual stairs to board the boldly implausible machine with its little windows and outlandish dangling engines. I follow with the slouched posture of the damned, click my ceremonial little seat belt (notably less robust than that of my Toyota Camry) and tamp a panic-maddened cackle. The pilot comes on the intercom with the vocal timbre of a drowsy 14 year-old and lightly describes an expected bit of “chop” as we rise to cruising altitude. “Shaddup, Scooter!” my mind blares. 

A Gathering of Lovebirds has Congregated at a Farmstead

A gathering of lovebirds has congregated at a farmstead outside Portland, Oregon, strumming guitars and stringing flowers and laughing their asses off. There will be a handmade altar radiant with human energy, unsuccessfully stifled sobs in the congregation, and such penetrating truth-telling as is ill-advised but in the presence of thronged community besotted with love. Later still a blue-eyed wedding guest – handsome face of a Maxfield Parrish sprite and vivid red scarf for a necktie – will tremblingly read aloud from sheets of rhapsodic prose. The theme of his soul-baring soliloquy? A paean to friendship and love offered up to a couple of dear pals, the groom and his sister, and the family that embraced the reader when he was younger and needing anchorage.  

There are free spirits aplenty in the wedding throng; lavishly inked therapists and engineers, professional clowns, urban planners, a provider of targeted ovine grazing. There is lots of genuine, graceless hugging, not the choreographed, finger-waggling performative hugging made popular in the 1970s by self-identifying “lovers” with shag haircuts (“c’mere, you!”). This is the autonomic hugging of devoted friends literally in love with each other, with the day, with the minutiae of passing hours. But for their collective professional alignment with AutoCad, Vertical Turbine Pumps, the DSM-5-TR, and the odd Proton Exchange Membrane, you could call this ecstatic crowd Dionysian. 

The long day will end with a hotshot band of musicians/Our Baby

The long day will end with a hotshot band of musicians known to Santa Barbara club cognoscenti by name. Friends of the marrieds, they’ve lofted across state lines to contribute celebrated chops to one long dance set wherein Miss Lauren Hill re-educates Lynyrd Skynyrd in a rare communion whose alchemy has wedding guests hopping like Tourette’s marionettes. 

But those moments under the marigolds hours before are the piercing marvel, the more so because the groom today was once upon a time Our Baby – the first miracle blob born to our tight friend group those years ago, our young, gangly gang welcoming with stunned, disbelieving tears this quiet little bambino, today’s willowy grinning groom at the altar blinking back his own tears and clutching flowers. Good grief. The utterly impossible does seem to happen with heartening regularity if you play your cards right. 

I look around at the community into which Our Baby and Our Baby’s Betrothed have lovingly grown and interwoven over years here in the great coniferous northwest, 100 or more eccentrically crafted companions sitting around on wooden benches with wet, stricken smiles of their own – a just counterweight to the world’s general slugfest. Humans are as cosmically fleeting as tachyons, but there is this pinhole of light we’re privileged to reach and peek through on strenuous tiptoe.

The bride’s grandmother, a grinningly regal 95 years old, comes to the altar and relays her truth – humor is the secret to a long and supple marriage. With a decorous English accent she tells a brief story that has the gathered loudly guffawing. 

The groom recites a startlingly musical suite of what he loves and expects and promises to give his betrothed and she returns with her own song of seeing, explaining Our Baby’s filigreed soul with a knowing she alone possesses in all the world, and whose expression speaks to her own inner life, and she is wholly revealed to us in an instant. I glance over at my old high school pals – the groom’s parents. They are – yeah – a mess, these moments more trying, even, than Algebra II. The bride regards her soon to be ex-boyfriend, whose own smile since childhood is that familiar beatific squint. With an expression of capitulation, she shrugs. All poetry but the birdsong is set aside. 

“It was you all along,” she says.