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I have to admit to butterflies in my tummy. My fiancé reassures me that emotions run high before a wedding. He knows; as a professional musician he has played scores of weddings. He tells amusing horror stories about drunken family brawls after too many wedding toasts and stormy weather ripping the wedding tent from its moorings, or the best: the bride tripping on the power cord as she walked up the aisle, silencing the band’s electronic wedding march.
Anyway, it’s not as if we haven’t done this before; it’s a second marriage for both of us. But it is a marvel becoming a newlywed and a senior citizen in the same year.
The proposal came out of the blue during a pension discussion, quite devoid of the archetypal knee-bending and ring-wielding. “Don’t joke about this,” scolded a trusted friend when I told her about it, “it’s a beautiful moment.”
The first idea I floated for our wedding was at an Elvis chapel in Las Vegas: minimal fuss. He countered that parents and family needed to be involved. I told his octogenarian father we were thinking of eloping. He laughed and offered to provide the ladder. But as we were already living together, this lacked drama.
I had been a widow for 20 years when I bumped into my fiancé. I met him at the ballet: the first he had ever attended in his life, being a new experience for a fresh divorcé. The story started in a Saturday afternoon rush line at Toronto’s Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts. As a savvy downtown dweller, I knew all the hacks for cheap tickets. I was keen to see a ballerina in a break-out prima role. I had spotted her in the back row of the corps de ballet in other performances and thought her undervalued. Apparently so had the hotshot guest choreographer. She was picked to dance Juliet in his restaged Romeo and Juliet.
But the person in front of me got the last rush seat for that evening’s performance. I was offered standing room but that’s too taxing on my fading eyesight. I tromped home angrily and bought an expensive ticket online for the following Saturday night’s performance: one of two excellent seats in the front row of an otherwise full balcony.
I found my seat early, slightly worried that the regular subscription holders of such good seats were going to show up and demand to know why I was in their seat. Shortly before curtain, a well-dressed, silver-haired man took the seat beside me. “Hi,” he said, “I’m David.” I thought to myself, cheekily, I’ve got a date.
David and I got to chatting and somehow, quite naturally, carried our conversation into the lobby at intermission. I talked dance. He talked music. He insists I flirted shamefully with him; I saw it the other way around. As we parted, with no reconnection in sight, I thanked him as David with no last name. He offered his; I, mine, an unusual surname, not difficult to track. The next morning there was an e-mail in my inbox.
Five years later, we were getting married. We decided on a minimalist family barbecue in his parents’ backyard in Ontario cottage country. My 61-year-old sister drove my 90-year-old father from New Brunswick (because he’d need a cardiologist’s approval to fly) and my 87-year-old mother with mild dementia, whose response to my excitedly telling her I was getting married again was a mystified: “Why?”
As many of our guests were over 80, the menu was a challenge. We catered to a diabetic, two vegans, degrees of gluten intolerance, a special diet for kidney disease and had to consider food for those who had issues with false teeth. It was important to respect two reformed alcoholics, which was tricky given an equivalent number of unrepentant and unreformed alcoholics, who gladly consumed on behalf of teetotaling family members.
The stag was hilarious: men crossing three generations (from my daughter’s twentysomething boyfriend with ear spacers and tattoos to the sixtysomething retirement set to the 80 and 90 year olds comparing their knee and hip replacements) all sank into the deck chairs at a chichi resort, drinking beer. The women, aged 20 to 80, were far more civilized. We had high tea at a pretty lakeside restaurant, scraping the men off the bar floor afterward.
Finding an appropriate wedding dress for an older second time around bride proved trying in a market crowded with overpriced chiffon cream puffs. Eventually I found a lovely dress with a sense of occasion that didn’t drown me in unnecessary veils and debt.
I rewrote the wedding ceremony, ditching the hallmark card drivel for serious poetry and created beautiful vows. As I read David the redrafted wedding ceremony, he smiled and said: “It’s going to be great. I can’t wait.”
That was eight years ago, another first for me, having been tragically widowed a few short years after getting married the first time. People remark on what a happy couple we make. David smiles with those killer dimples that first hooked me at Romeo and Juliet 13 years ago: “Sure glad I went to the ballet that night!”
Me, too.
Heather Lotherington lives in Toronto.