Our Way

One of the very best things about my time spent at Berkeley was getting the opportunity to meet Paul Groth, a terrific scholar of the everyday American landscape.   He really showed me what intellectual life looked like, why it was exciting, and helped me see that I could still be interested in architecture without being interested in "design."

And one of the best things about meeting Paul was that he introduced me to the work of one of his own favorite writers, Joan Didion.  I've now read pretty much everything she's published—fiction, non-fiction, and a lot of her reviews of others' work too.  But right now, one of her essays in particular stands in my memory: Marrying Absurd, originally published in 1967 in the Saturday Evening Post.  In it, she describes the Las Vegas wedding industry, unsure from her own economically and socially privileged position what to make of it. 

But Las Vegas seems to offer something other than "convenience"; it is merchandising "niceness," the facsimile of proper ritual, to children who do not know how else to find it, how to make the arrangements, how to do it "right."

I'm writing this from the Gramercy Mansion in horsey suburban Baltimore, about to be invaded by the swells coming to see the Preakness this Saturday.  The Gramercy does a lot of weddings; it's a lovely B&B that caters to families who know how to do it "right."

And yet... there's a fountain in the courtyard outside our retreat room, and in that fountain are two rubber ducks.  A bride duck, wearing a floral veil and a white aprony dress, and a groom duck in top hat, vest and bow tie.  It's cute, but its purchase also contributed another $15 to the wedding industry.  You go into a Michaels or an A. C. Moore crafts store, and there's a whole aisle of wedding preparations—silk flower petals for the little girls to scatter, cake toppers with the bride dragging the groom away by the collar, everything in ivory or pastel or plasticized "gold."  All there for families who want to do it "right" but who can't afford the concierge and the Gramercy Mansion staff to help them with it.

I've never been able to do things "right."  The anthropologist Clifford Geertz once said that every good anthropologist he'd ever met had felt like an outcast growing up, and thus had learned to look at culture rather than simply live it.  I've always wanted to do things because I thought they were the right thing to do, not because they were "right."

I'm glad that Nora and I are coming to this wedding planning as adults.  We both have a strong sense of what we want: how to celebrate our community, how to bring our supporters and friends together in a way that's about them as well as about us.  We haven't felt any pressure to use the "right" calligrapher and order the "right" kind of cake and have the "right" kind of music and adhere to the "right" ceremony.  We're doing what feels right, appropriate, celebratory.  We're making the preparations themselves into ways to be united, ways to explore our relationship, ways to thank all of you for your years of love and friendship.

There's a lot to do.  Some days it feels like too much to do.  But nobody else is making us do it.  Nobody else is insisting that things be "nice."  We're giving ourselves, and each other, and all of our friends, a collective gift.  And that feels... well, it feels right.