Wedding Journey

Friday I went to Long Island for a family wedding, which was fun but also made me a little melancholy. With the passage of time, my father's family has dwindled--there are four siblings in his generation now, where there were seven. I did not bring my father, who is 87 and not very mobile, because the trip on the Long Island Railroad would have been too much for him. (Actually, the whole thing would have been too much for him--ceremony at four, party at seven going until midnight, loud music, etc.)

Of the four remaining siblings in my father's family, the one sister who is left lives on Long Island, and she was there, but the two brothers are in different states, and did not make it to the wedding. Another sister, who was the grandmother of the young man who was getting married, just died in June, shortly after her 82nd birthday. I had seen her maybe a few months before, when she came to Brooklyn to visit my father, with one of her sons--no one at the time knew she had cancer, but she knew. I thought of her a lot during the wedding.

I was rushing around a lot to get to the wedding (not that there was any need to, but that seems to be my way, to be ready only at the last minute). I called car service to take me to the train station, and when I told the driver where I was going, he said, "Very hard to get there. Too much traffic. Third Avenue, Fourth Avenue, can't move." I said, despairingly, "I'm going to miss my train."

I guess the driver took that as a challenge, because he drove, shall we say, with great purpose and speed the three or four miles to the train station, honking at the double-parked cars and moving trucks along streets of stately brownstones, running the occasional red light, holding his ground when other taxis tried to cut him off on the busy commercial street leading to the train station. I paid the driver, ran out of the cab into the train station, saw I had about three minutes until the train, thought briefly about saving $7.00 by buying my ticket at the window rather than on the train, then thought, no, who needs the stress (!), and found myself a seat on the train.

When the train got to the sleepy station in Long Island near the church where the wedding was being held, I had about ten minutes to get to the church. I knew the church was only about a half-mile from the station, so I thought I could make it walking if I had to. But then I couldn't find the little map I had printed out from the internet, and I had no idea which side of the huge parking lot fronted on the road I needed to walk on, so I decided to take a cab. No cabs to be found (like I said, it was a sleepy station), but I saw a phone number for a cab service pasted on to the public phone, called them, the woman said she'd send someone over but it would be a few minutes. Fifteen minutes later, no cab. I called back and got a different dispatcher to explain to me how to walk to the church. ("You're in front of the Pathmark?" he asked. "Yes," I said. "OK, go south." Hmmm. . . . I squinted at the sun, but it was still so high in the sky that I wasn't sure I could tell which way was west, let alone south. "Do I cross the railroad tracks or stay on this side of them?" I asked. "No, stay on the side where you are and you'll be walking toward Main Street.") So I pulled a pair of flip-flops out of my bag, took off the wedding shoes, and high-tailed it down the road toward Main Streeet, which I could already see, although the dispatcher had warned, "It's a fair amount of walking." When I got to Main Street, there was a woman walking her dog (the first pedestrian I had seen). I asked her where St. Michael's was, and she said, "St. Mark's?", pointing to the church in front of me. I said, "Yeah, I guess that must be it," struggled back into my wedding shoes, and eventually found the door at the back of the chapel (after mistakenly opening the side door and almost walking into the ceremony). I found a seat at the back of the church just as the couple were beginning to exchange vows. One of my cousins turned around and waved to me. Her ten-year-old daughter, whom I had never met, asked her mom, "Who's that?" Her mom said something, and the girl turned back to me. "I'm your cousin," I whispered to her, smiling. She smiled back.

At the end of the ceremony, my cousin with the little girl took off, saying, "I'm going home to change--I'll see you at the reception." I went with another cousin, who had driven down from Massachusetts with a friend, to hang out at the home of the parents of the groom (my cousin P. and his wife) until it was time to go to the reception. At the house there were relatives milling around (mostly from P.'s wife's side, so we didn't really know them), three big dogs, coffee brewing and lots of cookies and cake. P. and his wife greeted us and then immediately said, "Sorry, we have to go take pictures in a park, make yourselves at home."

My cousin from Massachusetts, E., and I and some of the younger generation of cousins from our side, who had now shown up, looked at family pictures that were hanging on the wall. We had coffee and tea, played with the dogs. A cousin from the other side asked someone we didn't know, "Uncle Joe, do you think it's okay if I turn on the game?" My cousin E.'s friend, who had driven down with my cousin just to keep her company and didn't know anyone, was dismayed that we had to wait until seven for the reception. She kept saying how hungry she was. At one point she also asked, confusedly, "Whose house is this?"

One of the relatives of my cousin's wife (the mother of the groom) was a guy somewhat older than me, maybe late 50s, very warm and friendly. He offered me a cookie and I said, "Thanks, but I'm waiting for the coffee." "Me, too," he said emphatically, nodding to show me how wise he thought my stance on the cookies-and-coffee situation was.

My cousin E. said that he reminded her of our uncle P., long gone. I finally asked him, this nice warm guy, "Are you related to [mother of groom]?" "Yes," he said, "I'm her brother."

E. said, "We were just saying you reminded us of one of our uncles, if you look in the pictures there, you'll see him."

Then we all talked about family. E. and I remembered that our cousin's wife, this man's sister, had had a lot of aunts and uncles. So then he found a picture of his mother with her nine siblings, told us all their names, and which ones were still around (maybe half). His mother had died over twenty years ago, but as he told us the story of her passing his voice started to shake and he had to look down. My cousin E. talked about her mother's passing. I didn't tell any stories, but I felt sad.

Finally it was time to go to the reception. My cousin E. kept asking if we could follow someone, since she had no idea where she was, but everybody else seemed to be planning to follow someone, too. Finally, a lively-looking woman who turned out to be visiting from another state said, "I know where the hall is, but I'm not driving, I'm looking for a ride." E. happily handed over the keys to her Toyota. As we were getting into the car, the woman confided in me, "We can't get pulled over--I don't have my license on me."

We didn't get pulled over, made it to the reception, found our table. I was glad that I was seated with E., the cousin I am closest with of all that were there, and her friend. Also at our table was my cousin who had been at the ceremony with her little girl. Her mother, my father's last surviving sister, was there, too. She, my aunt M., gets around in a wheelchair and lives in a nursing home on Long Island. I hadn't seen her in a few years and felt emotional when I saw her. Also there, at our table, were four other elderly women, who seemed to be the surviving aunts from the picture we had been looking at earlier, that my cousin's wife's brother had shown us.

It took a little while for things to get going--some cocktails, some hors d'oeuvres, the bride and groom came in, first dance, etc. My Aunt M. wanted to go out and have a cigarette. Her daughter didn't want her to, especially because there was no ramp to the outside and getting her in and out of the wheelchair would be a big chore. I, however, am an easy mark (also didn't understand how complicated it would be) and helped my aunt outside for her smoke, along with someone else's nephew whom we commandeered. Her daughter came and found us after awhile, helped get aunt M. back in, and then said, "Now don't ever do that again!"

By the time we got back in, the buffet dinner was being served. My cousins had gotten me a plate. While we were eating, E. asked me if I had decided whether to stay with her and her friend in their hotel room or go home by the railroad. I said, "I think I'll stay with you."

Knowing I didn't have to get on the LIRR at midnight made me feel more free to have a good time. I tapped E. on the shoulder and gestured toward the dance floor. We got out there with the young people and the old people and started dancing. I felt happy to be there and especially to be dancing.

Things wound down eventually and we made our way to the hotel, ten or fifteen minutes away. E.'s friend kept saying, "Can you believe how we're finding everything and not getting lost?"

At the hotel, some drama: The clerk said, "No, sorry, we can't give you a rollaway bed in the room with two double beds--it's a fire hazard." Then she looked at the three of us and said, "Do you want me to draw straws to see who has to sleep with who?"

When we got into the room, which E. and her friend had already checked into and unpacked their stuff in, E. looked at us, and said, "Doesn't this room have a bad smell, like cigarette smoke?" Her friend said "Yes, I noticed it when we checked in." We looked at (or sniffed at) two other rooms, and E. decided the one on another floor was much better. So E. and her friend packed up all their stuff, loaded it onto the valet cart (which fortunately was still in the room), and we moved to the fourth floor. We took out our contacts (well, I did), got ready for bed, gossiped about the family. E. and I shared a bed since we were the ones that were related.

In the morning, we went to the diner next door for breakfast and then E. and her friend were going to drive me to the train and take off on their trip back to Massachusetts. The diner was one of those ornate, palatial ones, and E. and her friend were getting a big kick out of it. E. wanted a picture of us in front of it, with the sign for the diner showing. This took about three or four tries. I kept saying, "I'm going to miss my train."

We took off for the train station, following the directions the hotel clerk had given us. We ended up in an industrial park. Not a soul in sight--it was Saturday. Finally we found a guy, asked him about the train station. "Oh, you missed it," he said. He told us how to go back and find it, described the big parking lot we would see after the light. "Don't worry, you won't miss your train," he said. This seemed a little odd--how did he know which train I was taking? Maybe he was just an optimistic sort. We looked at each other and shrugged.

We pulled into a big parking lot. "Look," I said, "There are people. And that looks like a platform." But something still didn't seem quite right. We asked a guy getting out of his car, "Is this the train station?" No, he said, this was something to do with golf. "I think the train station is over there," he said, gesturing.

"Oh, yes, AFTER the light," I said to my companions, pointing to the traffic light.

We went past the light, turned left into the next big parking lot. "I still don't see the train station," said E.'s friend. But there it was, the little house with the name of the station, the train tracks, the platform.

No people, though, which meant I had missed my train.

"Oh, well," said E.'s friend. "An hour is not such a long time to wait."