I spent yesterday, the final day of 2007, doing more or less two things. I turned 39 years old and I attended my grandmother's wedding.
My grandmother's first wedding took place when she was seventeen years old and the celebration was enabled in good part by the pooling of ration coupons amongst friends and her intended's eight older siblings. My mother was born within a year while her father was, as they said at the time, somewhere in Europe. She'd be nearly three years old before he father came home and the newlyweds would be together again.
I was a child when my grandfather died and I'd be surprised if my youngest sister has any memories of him at all. For most of my life, my grandmother insisted she would never remarry, that she liked her independence and hard-won ability to look after herself. There would be a few gentlemen friends to squire her to the movies or to the diner for supper, and the occasional fancy dress reunion of this or that warship but in the main she was on her own and abundantly available to her four children, eleven grandchildren and eleven great-grandchildren.
And then she met (on a blind date) a man she not only would consent to marry, but offer her consent with such an alacrity that fairly shocked the entire family. Shocked we may have been, but we were all there present and quite literally cheering her on.
Very shortly after the ceremony the groom's son bundled up his young daughter and prepared to hurry back to his wife, who was too close to giving birth to travel safely or comfortably. He'd received a call that her contractions had begun in earnest and predicted that perhaps the time was near. With this is mind I shared with my grandmother and her new husband at my own leave-taking, some hours later, my realization that they would soon be jointly the grandparents of thirteen grandchildren ranging in age from infancy to 39.
Today I tried to explain to the Boy that very few children get to attend their great-grandmother's wedding, a notion that he of course couldn't quite grasp. I went on to tell him how lucky we are that she is so healthy and active and independent. "But Mommy," he said, "She's very pretty and not very old at all. Why wouldn't she be active?" His sister chimed in with the conviction that the bride must really be a princess and I saw that it must be true what is sometimes said about the very old and the very young, that the circle of age comes 'round on itself so that those who are truly left out of an understanding of life and love are those in the middle. The 39 year olds, for example.