On a happier note, here is my wedding write-up and some photographs. Look at us—so young! The wedding was a happy day, but you wouldn’t know it from that one photo of everyone there by the wedding cake with orange blossoms on top, a gift from Lois Starnes and her mother, who owned a bakery. There in the photo, Frank’s mother and my father both look sad, and we must have been worried about them, because we aren’t smiling either. Frank’s mother had not been to Massachusetts in years, and she had actually ridden the train with Horace to get there, a trip she then said she would never make again, and she was good to her word. I think maybe my father was nervous; he had told me several times he wanted it to be nice for me but what did he, a man, know about any of it. I almost said what I was thinking (that I wished she were there with us, that she would have known all the right things), but I didn’t.

And isn’t it funny how things get layered, how my memories of your weddings are in part about the way I remember my own, as if I had a foot in two places; I was there adjusting your beautiful veil, Becca, and I was also thinking how I had not had my mother there to adjust mine. Or I watched you drive off with all kinds of things soaped onto the windows of your cars, some not repeatable, written by the fraternity brothers of your first husband, and for the life of me, I cannot recall his name, embarrassing but true (starts with an “R,” I am fairly sure). Not that I need to recall it, but it’s a way I challenge myself to get there, go through the alphabet, riffle those file drawers of mine, packed to maximum capacity.