A wedding
My friend Liz married her daughter off yesterday. Both the bride and groom have the surnamde Gutierrez, which is a convenience since they don't have to decide whether anybody's going to change their name. Both have Mexican fathers and other types of angloish mothers. So the ceremony was rigorously bilingual. They got an aunt of Donaji's and an uncle of Francisco's to officiate -- apparently nowadays you can get anybody made a deputy commissioner of the county for the purpose. I wish that had been the case when we were getting married! The uncle did his part in English and the aunt did her part in Spanish and there was a program which translated each into the other language.
They did sweet little speeches about how cool it was that they were getting married this way, and talked about how wonderful their names were, and they had one teenaged girl reading that piece from Corinthians about how "there's faith, and there's hope, and there's charity, but the greatest of these is love," and that's when I cried because the last time I heard that read ot loud in a public ceremony it was my mother-in-law's funeral. And then another teenaged girl read this entirely sexy bit from an Irish poet. The couple got bound together with a lasso of ti leaves and gardenias draped in a figure eight on them by their respective mothers, and they exchanged rings, and they had to be told to kiss.
There were cute little kids of various hues carrying ring pillows and baskets of rose petals, and there were cute little kids playing very nice Irish music,
and a nice supper cooked by the culinary students at the community college (the venue is a nice house-like edifice owned by the college and rented out for stuff like this), and all in all, it was a proper wedding, not too long, not too complicated, with lots of fun details. Donaji is not a prima donna: she told her bridesmaids "get a nice green dress you'll want to wear later -- any color of green." Somehow they all ended up inthe exact same shade of sage green, each in a different and flattering dress.
And then, at the end, there was dancing to oldies, of course, and Donaji's mother and father -- divorced almost her whole life -- danced together and had fun. And that's worth recording!
on another front, I sent a piece about terraforming and too many lemons to Gastronomicon II. Flash fiction is actually kind of fun sometimes and I might write more of it, who knows?
on still another front but somewhat related, I don't quite understand these guidelines, but I have till February to figure them out.