We’re in the South right now, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia, arriving just after Hurricane Michael. But more significant than geographic and weather upheavals, is the experience of being part of two life-events that represent opposite ends of the life cycle.
We traveled East, first of all, for a wedding. On the top of a glorious mountain in Virginia, we listened to a fiddler play Appalachian tunes as a beautiful young bride prepared to walk down a grassy path to meet her groom. The mountain was so green and lush that it hurt our eyes, accustomed as we are to the golden dry grasses of our Santa Ynez Valley. When the hurricane passed through this region of Virginia two days earlier, making its way north and out to the Atlantic, it dumped feet, not inches, of rain. But other than the sparkling greenery, there was no evidence of the hurricane on the afternoon of the wedding. There wasn’t a cloud in the sky and the sun had almost completely dried out the earth as we made our way to our seats for the ceremony.
The sweet young bride and groom had known each other half a decade; they are smart, healthy, have jobs and supportive families. When they said their vows in front of friends and relatives, most of us watched through a slight mist of tears. They promised, their voices firm, to be loyal and true to one another. In sickness and in health, they said. In good times and in bad, for richer, for poorer, they pledged to love and cherish one another until death do they part. It is so powerful, this public declaration. Every one at the wedding was rooting for this young couple.
And, those of us of a certain age, who have been hurt and scarred by life’s surprises, were rooting especially hard. We know, don’t we, that there will be no way to avoid the hurricanes of life. With absolute certainty, no matter how faithfully one exercises at the gym, no matter how one tries to eat nutritiously, no matter how conscientiously one tries to manage one’s funds, there will be terrible, tough days. But courageously, this young couple took the enormously brave step of promising to share their lives.
When we left Virginia and the delightful weekend of wedding celebrations that included music and dancing and laughter, we drove to a house on a lake in North Carolina, where we visited my college roommate and her husband. Sally and I had shared a tiny apartment in Columbus over 50 years ago when we were seniors at Ohio State University. Soon after we graduated, I was a bridesmaid at her wedding.
We got married younger in those days, nearly 10 years younger than the couple just married on the mountain in Virginia. But today, neither of us is married to the men we married just out of college. However, the last thing I want to sound like is a curmudgeon. Sally and I both have wonderful husbands we are growing old with.
We feel lucky. Yet, 50 years after sharing that flat in our senior year, the scars on our bodies and spirits cannot be denied.
Inevitably, as Sally and I caught up on our lives, the conversation became what a friend calls, The Organ Recital. We discussed my recent surgery and her troublesome knee. Her husband fiddled with his hearing aid, mine talked about his vision loss. I told her I usually had a rule with my friends: only one story of physical infirmity and one cute grandchild anecdote per person. But maybe this could be an exception, as we hadn’t seen one another in so long. We laughed a lot and they cooked wonderful meals for us. We felt grateful for such a long, rich friendship.
That couple who got married up on the mountain in Virginia last weekend have no idea. There is an old Yiddish saying, “Man plans and God laughs.” I was middle aged, somewhere between the ages of that young couple and where I am today, before I realized that much in life is out of our control. But still, despite loss, illness, sorrow, I wouldn’t change any of it. For that newly married couple, as they start out together, I wish hours and days and years of joy, as well as the strength to withstand whatever hurricanes are in their weather forecast.