Never the Bride

Beware the honest keeping of a journal. It may show you, thirty years after you have written in it, just how full of holes your memory is. Apparently, I have retained the main points - the chapter headings - like some kind of outline, with all but the largest lines missing. Apparently, I did not turn away from my friends quite so easily as it now seems.

When I came home from college in the summer of '81, no fewer than five weddings were about to happen in my little circle of friends, and at least one of my former classmates was expecting her first baby. I attended these weddings. I dressed up and stood beside the wedding guest books, inviting people to sign them, and I dressed up and sat next to the next bride at her bridal shower, making the ribbon "bouquet" out of the gift ribbons and a paper plate. I dressed up again, and attended another wedding, this time sitting in the pew and vowing not to use "A Problem Like Maria" as a wedding march - especially if the aisle of the church is really short and doesn't allow for the entire theme to be played through. I dressed up and attended another one, and vowed not to use lime green tuxedos if I ever got married, and came home and wrote,

"Two weddings in one day is a bit much for me. (My brother has been singing one line of the Pepsi-Light commercial for the last 10 minutes.)"

Somebody ought to write about what it feels like to attend the weddings of your peers when you, yourself, have nothing but bewilderment and a sense of waiting for something to happen to attend with you as "guest." Oh, wait. People have written about that. There are many utterly forgettable movies and books about this miserable moment in life, and they are all forgettable for the same reason it appears to have taken me about ten more pages to berate myself thoroughly enough to straighten up and move away from a young past into a young future. By the end of June, I made it all the way to,

"I know I belong to somebody already - the only problem is his finding me."

By the first day of July, I wanted to know the identity of this elusive man so that I could,

"...march up to him and shake him by the shoulders and say, 'What on earth is taking you so long?!'"

* * * * *

He didn't take much longer. I didn't have time to realize how ludicrous it was to be at this level of frustration at only twenty-one years old, because he found me at the New Church, when he was visiting with his aunt and uncle that Sunday morning. And I found him right back, at the first meeting of the New Church's summer meetings for the New Study, eagerly diagrammed and charted copied and passed out to the New Group of young people gathered in my parents' New House on Belmont Street. My whole life was becoming entirely new to me. Everything changed on July 10, when I turned my attention to David - the wrong David.

Note to all young women of marriageable age: you'll blush less later if you calm down now.