Champagne Memories

On March 17 (St. Patrick’s Day), 1979 I married the person I was supposed to marry. Of course I didn’t realize until years later just how lucky I was that things turned out that way. Marriage is a leap of faith. We fall in love, get engaged, plan a wedding and then suddenly the day of the wedding arrives and you think – this is for the rest of my life, how can I be sure? But usually the couple goes through with it, as we did, because of faith. I consider myself fortunate to be in the company of others who have made the right choice; I hope my husband feels the same! The point of all of this is to tell about my wedding.

We had our wedding in a town 500 miles away from my hometown. We were married in our college town, but had the bonus of having my maternal grandmother in the same town. She agreed to host the wedding reception in her home as she had done for most of her ten children. My parents and siblings flew in a day or two before the wedding and all of the wedding arrangements had been made, as simple as they were. Having recently orchestrated Daughter #1’s wedding I am flabbergasted that my mother naively went along with my plans. I chose a simple, inexpensive dress (however it was to that date the most expensive dress I had ever owned), I found a woman to bake the wedding cake in her home and my soon-to-be husband and I transported it in our own vehicle to my grandmother’s house (perhaps the subject of another blog to be titled “how I almost got a divorce before I was married”), I even hired a photography student from the local university to take the wedding photos. In short, I planned a beautiful, simple, cheap wedding, but it was just what I wanted.

The only detail I intentionally left undone was purchasing the alcohol for the reception, my father wanted that duty. On the eve of my wedding, while my soon-to-be husband was bachelor partying and I was fretting about the bachelor party, my father purchased several cases of champagne and set up a make-shift bar in my grandmother’s pine paneled den. For the bar he laid a board across some stacked cinder blocks and covered the whole thing with a starched white tablecloth.

The memory of the wedding ceremony in the same Catholic church where my parents were married twenty-two years before (and where my daughter and son-in-law were married twenty-seven years later) is a blur, but I remember the reception clearly. My father in his best suit proudly pouring champagne to our friends and relatives, my mother passing out plates of the delicious “home-made” wedding cake, and the young photographer snapping photos of the happy couple are with me vividly to this day.

Then why do I need two empty champagne bottles I have saved for thirty years as a remembrance of my wedding? Good question. I just took two dusty green bottles out of the hall closet and I feel guilty about even thinking of throwing them away (actually I will recycle them). But obviously, I don’t need the bottles to remind me of one of the best days of my life. Everyday I see the man I married thirty year ago. I know his hair has grayed and his waist has grown, but I still see the young man I had the faith to marry; the young man who toasted his bride with cheap champagne poured by my beaming father at the make-shift bar.

The two champagne bottles were all I purged from the hall closet today, but I am making more progress than physically removing items – I am realizing I don’t need to hang on to the “stuff” in order to keep the memories.