The Wedding Photo
The four-by-three-inch photograph of our June 27, 1973, wedding kept coming back to mind. It sits under a plastic mat in my office.
We’re standing on the front lawn of our house in State College, Pennsylvania, and it’s a tender, warm, cloudless day, the sky saying you have limitless possibilities.
I noticed how tall everyone was standing together in various forms.
Sue, five feet two inches tall, is twenty-nine years old. She’s holding my hand and my grandmother Yetta’s hand, her arms spread out as if she's about to take off flying. Yetta, four feet eight inches, is dressed in white with a purple scarf around her neck.
Sue is wearing a crocheted white shawl and a purple floral full-length cotton dress, partly covered by her smooth, long, brown hair. Behind Sue is a small, plastic kid’s swimming pool filled with yesterday’s water, daring us, “Come on in, folks.”
I’m twenty-six years old, wearing a dark blue, second-hand suit from the college thrift store. My red, unkempt beard and long, wavy hair obscure my jacket collar. The slim Baptist minister Robert Boyer, forty-five years old, is smiling beside the seven-foot-tall Chuppah (canopy) under which Sue and I are standing. My Bar Mitzvah tallis covering the Chuppah shows its white ending threads (called tzitzit) hanging between Sue and my grandmother.
My father’s back is to the camera, showing his black suit and muscular build from his daily workouts. He is fifty-eight years old. Sue’s five-year-old, Cathy, wears her favorite red checkered knee-length dress with a bow in the back. Her hands are gripping tightly under the bow as she looks up at Sue.
The picture evokes memories of people who were at our wedding but weren’t included in the photo. My mother was sitting to the side and seemed smaller than I remembered her; her shoulders drooped forward, and her skin was rough and spotted from daily alcohol and tobacco addictions. A few friends and family also attended—even two people from the street who seemed to stop by to see the ceremony.
That photo sits under a large plastic mat on my desk. I picture the miles my mind traveled as Sue stayed there in the photo, poised in the backyard, holding my hand as she held her thoughts. She carries what lingers from our lives together. Like a red exit light that stays on, gazing at me from that photo.
