Wedding Relations

It had seemed like a miracle that thirteen of my Canadian relatives were traveling from that great northern country. I’d entertained fantasies that the three days of festivities celebrating my son’s wedding here in California would bond us together in a new way. Thirty other affable relatives of the bride and some from my late husband’s family were also arriving from places in Mexico and the eastern USA.

For months the wedding topic had been on our every exhale. My son Frank was engaged to Gema, a beautiful young woman of Mexican heritage. It was a match that had everyone smiling as we watched his Nordic coloring and manners harmonize with her Latin ways; smiling about the weekly dance classes during which they perfected the rhumba for their first wedding dance; smiling as we saw them planning every detail of their wedding together.

As the groom’s mother, I hosted an outstanding rehearsal dinner at a Sausalito waterfront restaurant. I’d shared my delight in the process in during numerous phone calls to Vancouver with my sister Helen and was quite disappointed when at the eleventh hour she couldn’t make her flight to San Francisco. Other anxieties embarked her on a week-long bender that landed her in an acute-care hospital. Helena has been an ongoing support to me, but tragically, she withdraws from life into gallons of vodka every so often. My sister Carroll from Winnipeg, on the other hand, did make her flight, but Air Canada temporarily misplaced her small suitcase. “Take me to Nordstroms,” she cried desperately upon her arrival and off we raced in search of replacement shoes for her flat feet. She deserves a special mention because she was petrified a nervous type who’d never traveled anywhere without her husband. Later, during the wedding, she never smiled, not once, during our happy event, thereby affecting many of the expensive photos.

Cousins Joan, John and friends Judy, Art and Claire flew in to San Francisco, rented their own cars and drove to their own hotels but my dear brother Fred, his stalwart wife Faye and daughter Sabine from Toronto made the mistake of renting a hotel room fifty miles away, in Palo Alto. They engaged a rental car with a GPS system that confused them whenever they tried to travel to Marin County.