For JM Sorrell
Things in our lives do not always go as planned, so when my friend called with the very sad news her father was in hospice care and she needed to pick up and be with him during this time, I instantly agreed to officiate at the wedding she had agreed to do before her father’s health deteriorated.
**
Picture clear blue skied late-day early September Boston, on a balcony overlooking cityscape near the Common.
One of the grooms at the wedding I officiated last weekend was seemingly more preoccupied with having to speak in front of people in English (he’s French) than the commitment he was making. It’s funny how at that moment—show time—the hugeness of the actual endeavor recedes and the relatively small measure of time—a single day, even a few minutes in the spotlight—overtakes.
I reassured them both that nervousness is entirely normal. I gave my best pre-ceremony advice: Speak slowly. If you don’t, don’t worry. Try to speak to each other, because even though those (twelve, fifty, one hundred, three hundred) people are watching, this is really between the two of you.
This was a lovely couple. Their ceremony was very endearing, because it was filled with their earnestness—the American recited in French, the Frenchman recited the poem in English—and their love, one in the middle of life that came with both the glow of newer romance and the wisdom of knowing in some less starry-eyed way to include sharing hard times not just sunsets and champagne. Each partner expressed he’d found his true love, his perfect match, but each said this with such a sense of being rooted in himself that the words, ones that could sound overly romanticized, did not at all.
**
But the moment I loved as much as any other came after the ceremony. D’s self-proclaimed best man (there wasn’t exactly one) came to Boston from Paris with speech in pocket. Though an old, dear friend of the American groom, he was a French man. He was a married, heterosexual, serious Christian churchgoing man. Years into the friendship, his best friend revealed the one thing he’d never before shared: his sexuality.
The old friend said, “I was shocked. How could I have not known this? I didn’t understand. But God gave me a gift in learning that there are so many ways to love. I worried what would happen to D, what would his future hold. The answer is his true love.”
Teary, I thought the obvious: the only way to make people turn around about gay marriage, the naysayers that is, will be for every one of them to have a friend, brother, niece find true love, and celebrate it. Here’s what else sprung to mind, though: hearts in hands, putting yourself and what you feel most strongly about out there, it’s always, but always, a beautiful thing.
**
Another thing that is always heart in hand for me these days are images of small children’s hands holding things. The photo I swiped is of my pal Silas cradling a perfectly Silas-sized zebra tomato; it’s as if the earth produced it especially for him, and I think that’s the reason images like this always touch me in such a tender spot. After all, isn’t the world supposed to usher forth things that fit our hands and our hearts perfectly? I say yes.
