An Afternoon Wedding Is a Merry Time : Jack Smith

We went to a wedding one recent Saturday. There have been more funerals than weddings in our lives lately, and it was a welcome change.

The bridegroom was Tim Johnson, who had grown up down the street from us on Mt. Washington with his older sister and brothers--Dana, Tommy and Terry. As soon as he was old enough to explore the neighborhood, he would turn up at our house and we would talk. He was a non-stop talker. Full of convictions and questions. He asked about everything from bombs to butterflies. A delightful kid.

In time the Johnsons moved away, but Tim would come back periodically--just turning up at the front door--to let us know what he was doing. College. Jobs. Then one night he brought a girlfriend. Her name was Diana Nickels and it was obvious that there was a bond between them.

The wedding was at 3 o’clock in the afternoon at Our Lady of Lourdes Church in Northridge. We arrived right on the dot. Tim’s parents were still on the porch. Tom Johnson’s hair had turned silver; but mine was white. We met the flower girl--the younger Tom Johnson’s daughter, Misty. She was shy. She put her head down and turned her face away. Being a flower girl isn’t easy.

We took our seats on the bridegroom’s side of the church. I had started to go down the center aisle but my wife stopped me. “That’s for the bride,” she said. “ You’ve been to enough weddings to know that.”

The interior of the church was spare, with a sculpture of the crucified Jesus on a gilded plate above the altar. The priest was surprisingly young, with a crew cut and a shotputter’s build. Ushers in tuxedos with pink cummerbunds escorted Tim’s parents and Diana’s mother and grandmother down the center aisle. Then came the bridesmaids--in rose--and the flower girl. She walked as if her white slippers were too tight.

“Where’s the bride’s father?” my wife whispered.

In a few minutes the organ struck up Wagner’s wedding march. We looked around. The bride was standing at the head of the aisle in white satin. She was looking back over her shoulder. A man was stooping at the end of her train, straightening out the folds.

“You’ve been to enough weddings,” I said, “to know that the father escorts the bride down the aisle.” We were even.

The father got the train straightened out and took his daughter’s arm and they walked down the aisle. The bride and bridegroom knelt before the altar and the young priest began the Mass, reading from John: “All thanks be to God.”

Up in the choir loft a young woman accompanied by a guitarist sang “Never Be the Same.” It seemed an appropriate sentiment.

The priest praised the bride’s radiance and beauty. “Too bad you have to marry the beast,” he said. Surprise and laughter. It was the first joke I had ever heard in a Catholic wedding Mass. Finally the rite of marriage was performed, with the exchange of vows and rings and the blessing.

The priest performed communion, the young woman in the choir loft sang “All I Ever Want to Be,” and after the final blessing the bride and bridegroom walked together up the aisle. The flower girl followed. I noticed she was barefoot. What had she done with her slippers?

Out on the porch I asked her grandmother, Evelyn Johnson. “Her father has them in his pocket,” she said.

A reception and champagne dinner followed at the Burbank Airport Hilton. A little combo played dance music and the bride and bridegroom went out to dance the first dance. It was sedate. But soon the bridal party joined them, and then the guests, and the mood swung to rock and pop and everyone was out there snapping fingers and thrusting hips this way and that and rocking shoulders. My wife made some remark to the others at our table about our not knowing how to dance anymore.

“I’ll be happy to buy you a course at Arthur Murray,” I said.

“What good would that do me,” she said, “without a partner?”

“If you learned how,” I said, “I could pick it up.”

From this day forward, in sickness and in health. . . .