BLENDING MODERN ROMANCE INTO THE FAMILY TRADITIONS

In the first toast of this black-tie evening, the young man pushed his chair out and stood, champagne flute raised high.

“It’s really great to see my father acting like a giddy 16-year-old,” he said from his vantage point of 28 years, including one (and counting) of his own matrimonial bliss.

We in the chairs next to this upstart giggled like girls at a slumber party and, our glasses poised, we looked around. Yes, it was cool.

The groom himself, 51 years old, father of two, grandfather of one as of three months before, gave off quite a hoot. My cousin, the 45-year-old bride, beamed.

She would say later that her new stepson’s toast set a wonderful tone for this fancy reception, unstuffy, honest and tackling the reality of the situation head on.

Because our family is new to this kind of stuff.

I think the significance of all this hit me when I heard my own mother asking friends of the groom if theirs was a “blended family,” and indeed, she did so with a pleasant smile on her face, as if such a question were for her the most natural in the world.

Why, yes, in fact this nice couple from Detroit said that they had blended their offspring (four of his, four of hers) and now they were apparently happy as clams. My mother, married to my father for 39 years, seemed genuinely pleased.

And I was still wondering where she had picked up this “blended” term.

Much of our family’s journey into the bramble-ridden thicket of modern romance has been like this, on silent cat feet mostly and then, a pounce. Generations have married, and stayed that way, until death parted that bond.

As a teen-ager, I remember feeling oddly uneasy, as if I were party to a betrayal of sorts, when my grandfather married again more than a year after my grandmother had died. In the videotaped recording of that blessed event, my sister and I were caught on camera rather viciously throwing rice.

But then again, our family has never let tradition bind our different souls. I would go on to live with a man without benefit of marriage and my parents, well, they would acquiesce; at least he was a Jew. And no doubt they thought of the alternative: I could have eloped, as they had done those many years before.

My sister, too, would live with a man outside of matrimony, although those two later went on to legalize their match. (I, fortunately, didn’t let any new wave convention force me into a mistake. I married somebody else.)

Then there is my cousin, the daughter of my father’s brother. She, alone, has divorced. But that union was widely reported within the family as rather strange, a mismatch, an I-told-you-so just waiting to unfold. It lasted all of six months.

Still, it was on the books. And convention, even among those trying desperately to be nice, can stick in one’s craw.

There had been words muttered about my cousin’s wedding, about all the “carrying on,” as if, it seemed to me, it would have been more proper for her to act somewhat ashamed of her new, all-consuming love.

But who says that second marriages should, by edict, be more shabby than the first? Why should a second-round bride wear decorum as if it were a shroud? Where is it written that the shadow of a divorce must trail you, even on your wedding day?

This is one reason why, despite a daylong airline flight, I was determined to attend this affair. I’d have worn bells if I could. As it was, sequins were fine.

Yes, there was a lot of carrying on--and it was giddy, and good.

The groom even sang to the bride as she walked down the aisle to join him under the chuppah , the small canopy under which the wedding couple and rabbi stood.

I don’t remember what the song was--I may never have heard it before--but there was one word that kept jumping out. It was hope .

And I do remember that many of us in the synagogue had tears standing in our eyes.

(No, none of us could even imagine our own husbands so much as humming in public if there were a chance of being heard.)

Sure, you could look at this middle-age romance business from a different place. You could call it schmaltzy, too much, as in: Oh, spare me please.

But, then again, that might say more about you than it does about this couple in love. We should all carry on with such joy.