It was from having a wedding that I learned another reason to do so, one that I could not have anticipated beforehand. I don’t know how often, if ever, our families will have occasion to come together like that again. But I am glad they did so at least once, to honor the fact that, in the historical record, they have now been brought together permanently. Love is not just the private “&” that joins one person to another, whether scribbled in notebooks or printed on wedding invitations. It is also the genealogical “and,” the kind that signifies the confluence of families and the accumulation of generations. Like grief, love rearranges existing relationships: I am bound now to C.’s entire lineage and she to mine, and they are bound to each other in perpetuity.
That union, like so many others, is made richer and more wonderful for all the differences it spans. “Glory be to God for dappled things,” Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote in a poem of praise for all the coupled contrasts of the world, for all things “swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim.” And God knows, we were a dappled bunch that day—Jewish and Christian, atheist and devout, rural and urban, conservative and progressive, straight and queer. I know that to some of our guests, our wedding must have felt traditional, for reasons that began with its very existence and continued on from there: the aisle to walk down, the rings to exchange, the tent under which we ate dinner, the general if approximate hewing to the usual order of things. And I know that to others, it must have felt radical, for reasons that also began with its very existence and continued on from there: no gifts, no bridal shower, no rehearsal dinner, no wedding dress, no member of the clergy to marry us, a series of readings that would not have been out of place in a graduate seminar. But truly, who, on such an occasion, could possibly care? We read from the Bible, broke a glass, said grace before the meal, were lifted up laughing in our chairs to dance the hora; outside of wishing my father had been there, I can’t imagine a single thing I would change about that day.
Including this: after the ceremony, after the dinner, after the toasts, after dessert, after night had long since fallen and half the party was sitting talking and the other half was on the dance floor, I looked out into the darkness and saw, way down low along the horizon, a towering bank of clouds turn swiftly, briefly orange. I appreciated the distance the storm was keeping, as well as its tactful timing, and turned back to the party. Twenty minutes later it hit, with a wallop of thunder so loud I thought at first one of the nearby walnut trees had come crashing to the ground. The rain arrived immediately and drastically, rushing at us sideways like white water over the prow of a ship. An admirably sane minority bolted immediately for the indoors. The rest of us stayed for a while, half-protected and doubtless half-endangered by the tent, watching with a kind of mesmerized exultant glee as, all around our three-hundred-degree panorama, lightning branched down the sky and lit up the bay. After a few minutes of this I went up to C.’s friend the caterer, who was by then on the dance floor, and who also by then had worked two decades’ worth of events on the water. Shouting to be heard over the music and the storm, I asked him if the most wonderful day of my life was about to end in the sudden and horrible death of everyone I loved most in the world. “I don’t know,” he shouted back, which was equivocal enough for me. But just as I was starting to round up the guests to herd them inside, a particularly dramatic bolt of lightning turned the whole world white and, as one, we shot out of the tent and, dress shoes squelching and sinking into the grass, raced for the covered porch.
No tornado touched down on the Eastern Shore that night, but seldom in my life have I experienced such an epic storm. I would not have thought to request it, if it had been in my power to design down to the level of meteorology the events of my wedding, but I can’t imagine a better ending to our lovely sunny day. A few people headed off to bed; the rest of us bundled into the chairs and couches on the porch, talking and laughing and snacking on a tin of cookies that someone had produced out of nowhere, all the while watching the spellbinding sky. I remember in particular my mother sitting there among us, looking wet and radiant and lively enough to stay up with us until two in the morning, which she did.
But long before that, one last unexpected thing transpired. At ten minutes to midnight, C., who seldom forgets anything, shot upright out of her chair. What she had remembered, all of a sudden, was the marriage license, which, in the happy tumult of the day, we had completely forgotten to sign. In retrospect, I suppose we could have just let it go and backdated it the next day, but somehow in the moment that seemed like the wrong way to start our married life, and so I went upstairs and roused from her imminent slumber the jet-lagged British friend who had served as our officiant.
We have, by design, no video of our actual wedding ceremony, but someone got out a phone and made a recording of our impromptu second one. In it, I am sitting in C.’s lap as our officiant, in pajamas and high spirits, signs us with a grand eleventh-hour flourish into marriage. All around us, our family and friends raise another round of drinks, and C. pulls me in for a kiss. Then a bolt of lightning switchbacks down the sky behind us, and for a moment, all you can hear is laughter, and all you can see is light.
* * *
—
It is so rare, a day like that—a day of ongoing, unadulterated, self-evident joy. I don’t mean that, among emotions, joy is particularly ephemeral; I mean that it is unusual to experience any emotion all on its own for a sustained length of time. Physical sensations, even those that afflict a comparatively healthy body, can be relentless. A sufficiently bad toothache or any other persistent pain can dominate your every waking moment. But even the strongest sentiments are intermittent and inconstant, forever obliged to share the stage with other members of emotion’s ensemble cast—grief with gratitude, anger with boredom, happiness with irritation, frustration with amusement, and on and on, in endless permutations.
Most of us instinctively resent this intermingling. When we are happy, we want to be wholly happy, not also missing our father or worried about work or infuriated by the awful customer service at the phone company. That appetite for contentment makes perfect sense—but we often long to experience our disagreeable feelings uninterrupted as well. In part, that’s because misery has a kind of inertia to it; there is something about a bad mood that wants, perversely, to persist. I have felt, at various low points in my life, that I did not want to venture out to a social event because I would have to pretend to be happy, forgetting the very real possibility that, once there, I would actually be happy—or, perhaps more accurately, believing that I did not want to feel better. Worse, I have sometimes persevered in a pointless argument simply because I was in the kind of sour mood that would rather fight than be improved. This kind of emotional intransigence is common. Anger wants only to be angry (levity is deadly to it, as is compassion; accordingly, it resists them both); boredom rejects as boring everything that might vanquish it; loneliness wants only to be left alone; and grief, as I noted earlier, is so terrified of betraying itself that it wants only to grieve.