I’ve been too busy with weddings to
write anything for months. Believe me, it is a lot of work being father of the
bride, and it does not get easier the third time.
Here’s the amusing side of all these
weddings: We have only one daughter, Mandy, and she’s had only one husband,
Ron.
They apparently just like getting
married to each other.
The first ceremony took us by
surprise, although we knew it was coming. Mandy and Ron had tipped us off that
they planned to be married at a date to be announced, and Ron even extended the
old-fashioned courtesy of asking for our blessing even though he certainly knew
our approval would be immediate and enthusiastic.
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| Wedding I at the city clerk's office |
The surprise came when my wife and I
were visiting family in New Jersey just over a year ago. Mandy and Ron asked us
to join them for a day out in Manhattan, where they live and work. She didn’t
mention that our destination would be the city marriage bureau.
After a brief ceremony, the four of
us took a cab to Chinatown for lunch. I’m pretty sure the ride was the day’s
biggest expense.
Is anything in life ever just that
simple?
Our dim-sum feast was delicious but
it didn’t satisfy Mandy and Ron’s appetite for sharing their happiness. Their
solution was to plan Wedding II, which Mandy assured us would be an intimate
affair for their closest friends. As it turned out, they have as many close
friends as I have gray hairs.
That’s a silly exaggeration, of
course. I don’t have nearly that many hairs of any color these days.
Months of planning and hard work culminated
in a four-day party in the Catskill Mountains, where Ron has owned a get-away
house for some time. They both enjoy a weekend of small-town bliss there whenever
they can escape the crush of the city. This time, the city came with them.
Their legion of smart, funny and
creative friends took turns riding a ski lift to gather on a grassy
mountaintop. There, Mandy and Ron exchanged vows while a jazz band
played All Of Me.
It was great fun, if not much
like anything my wife and I were raised to think of as a traditional Armenian wedding.
Fair enough, we thought, as Ron wasn't Armenian—not yet, anyway.
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| Wedding II on the mountain |
But the reception did feature Armenian
wine, brandy and coffee. And we enjoyed a pre-wedding family feast of Armenian
foods that my wife and I spent days cooking. This led to Ron discovering the joy of eating leftover dolma for
breakfast. There is no going back to odar
life after that.
Ron had caught enough of the spirit to place little Armenian flags along the dinner table. Better yet, he contributed
to the dinner’s most important element by helping me refurbish the shish kebab
machine that my late father-in-law made many years ago. Now it will serve a new
generation for years to come.
When the festivities concluded,
Mandy and Ron set off for the Grand Canyon and other points West. “Two weddings should be enough for anyone,” I
joked, but neither one laughed.
“Dad!” Mandy said in exasperation.
“We still need to get married in an Armenian church.”
She’d had that in mind all along, as
it turned out—and not just any Armenian church, but St. David Armenian Apostolic Church
in Boca Raton, which she attended while growing up. “The wedding doesn’t have to be a big deal this time,” she
added.
Now it was my turn to laugh: There
is no such thing as a small-deal Armenian wedding.
One complication soon became apparent: Mandy and Ron had killer schedules stretching to nearly the end of
the year. Wedding III and Honeymoon II would have to somehow straddle Christmas
and New Year’s Day.
When Mandy posed the scheduling challenge
to the Rev. Father Paren Galstyan, he cheerfully assured her they’d find a date
that worked but he raised a challenge of his own. Mandy and Ron would have to
attend a series of counseling sessions at which Ron would have to learn pretty
much everything about our church.
That was a stumper, as Mandy and Ron
live more than a thousand miles from the church and they were likely to arrive
with little time to spare. “Don’t worry,” the priest said. “I Skype.”
Clearing up these little details took months. While a suitable date did emerge, the three essential parties
couldn’t find common Skype time before Mandy and Ron arrived in Florida just days
before the ceremony.
As expected, Father Paren’s
cheerfully confident response was, “Don’t worry.” He solved the problem by
turning what they thought would be a brief meeting into a day-long cram session
on the beliefs, rituals and history of the Armenian Church.
If you don’t think that amounts to
much, consider that the Armenian people accepted Christianity 1,706 years ago. I’ve had a lifetime to learn it all and I
still have to watch my wife to be sure when to stand up and when to sit down
during a typically brisk two-and-a-half-hour Sunday service.
God bless Ron! He took it all very seriously, and he continued to pay rapt attention through rehearsal. The ceremony came off without a hitch. He and Mandy looked like a truly royal Armenian couple wearing the crowns that identified them as king and queen of their own realm.
In the end, each wedding was
wonderful in its own way but the third was definitely the charm—a true blessing
as well as homage to all the generations before us who walked this same path.
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| Wedding III Armenian at last! |
Father Paren was a blessing himself,
employing just enough English to make the ceremony understandable to our many
non-Armenian guests. We thanked him especially for making Ron feel very much at
home.
“Is he Armenian now?” my wife asked jokingly.
Father Paren looked serious. “He didn’t need all this just to be Armenian. It’s
ABC: He’s Armenian By Choice!”
The rewards of being Armenian may not always be obvious to others but they are very real and important to all of us. Ron has already discovered one of the most important: Sometimes when you are very lucky, there is leftover dolma for breakfast.
