Yes

At the end of the wedding ceremony last night, our friend Jason Webley (who got ordained on the internet, and wrote a wonderful ceremony and married us) read this poem by e.e. cummings:

i thank You God for most this amazing

day:for the leaping greenly spirits of trees

and a blue true dream of sky;and for everything

which is natural which is infinite which is yes

(i who have died am alive again today,

and this is the sun's birthday;this is the birth

day of life and love and wings:and of the gay

great happening illimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing

breathing any-lifted from the no

of all nothing-human merely being

doubt unimaginably You?

(now the ears of my ears awake and

now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

I found myself mouthing along with it, like a prayer: I'd closed the last issue of Black Orchid with it, over twenty years ago, and it was still there in my head, saying yes in the best possible way.

Amanda and I married on Sunday night (actually and legally, this time) almost on the spur of the moment. The handful of people who were at the wedding were the people we were going to have dinner with on the Second of January anyway. They just got a little more than they were expecting.

The evening was hosted and improvised with love and gusto by our friends the Chabon-Waldmans, and Daniel Handler played the accordion when Amanda came down the stairs wearing the dress she had worn as a human statue, so long ago. Rosie Chabon, cutest creature on earth, was our flower girl. Mexican food was eaten, and pie, pie in enormous quantities.

Probably getting married in a friend's parlour, with a dozen friends around who weren't really expecting this but who threw themselves into making a wedding for us out of nothing, and a daughter and a son lending their support and love, isn't how everyone would plan a wedding. But we'd been engaged exactly a year, and it felt incredibly right to improvise a wedding as we went along. So we did it. And were as happy as any two people had ever been.

And then today, after a night together, Amanda went to Australia, and I went home to the cold. We won't see each other for ten days, until we meet in Tasmania; and while everything else just happened and wasn't organized, but just fell perfectly into place, I've decided there's a lot to be said for organised honeymoons that immediately follow weddings. Losing your bride immediately smacks of carelessness.

Labels: A Wedding, Wedding Poem, yes-and