Before We Know What It Means

A week or so ago, I had to run up to the Bay Area to pick up some paperwork from the County Clerk’s office. I sat with my son in the waiting area, staring at the small number they had assigned to us.

“Now serving number 92 at window number 5,” came the voice overhead.

Eleven more to go. I glanced over at my son, who was wearing his headphones and staring at his iPhone. He seemed fine, I suppose.

Then something I rarely get to see started unfolding.

A young couple dressed in wedding attire walked past us. The chapel was right next door, and as they placed their belongings on the bench next to us, I quietly watched from the corner of my eye.

I first noticed the bride, in a short, layered organza dress with off-the-shoulder ruffles. I hadn’t seen a dress that managed to be formal and playful at the same time until now. Her makeup was beautifully done, her hair swept up, and her expression more serious than the ruffles of her gown suggested. I wondered if she was nervous, excited, or both. She looked down while the groom, dressed in a navy blue suit, hurried off to retrieve more of their belongings.

I turned slightly toward my son. “How often do you get to watch someone experience one of the most memorable moments of their life?”

Ironically, I was there to get a copy of my husband’s previous marriage certificate. A record of another wedding. One he doesn’t talk about very often.

Watching this young couple, I started thinking about our own wedding. When I got engaged to my husband, I planned on having it at the San Francisco courthouse. It seemed like the perfect combination of simplicity and convenience.

At the time, I never really understood the hoopla around weddings. They seemed unnecessarily elaborate and, frankly, a waste of money. Eventually, after much discussion with all of the “voices of reason” in my life, I gave up on the courthouse idea. We planned what became one of the best days of my life, a labor of love made possible by our family and friends.

I’ve changed my opinions since then.

Sitting there, I thought briefly about getting up and asking the couple if they wanted me to take a picture of them. Then I pictured my son shaking his head at me, as though taking pictures of strangers would be the ultimate way to embarrass him. Then I wondered whether they even wanted a stranger inserting herself into their moment. Maybe it would just be awkward.

“Now serving number 104 at window number 7.”

I grabbed my things and whispered, “That’s us!”

As I walked up to the counter, I turned around and saw that the groom had set up a camera on a tripod, pointed toward the chapel door. She was getting ready. They were way ahead of me.

It wasn’t until then that I really noticed the strangeness of where I was. I was waiting for a document from a wedding that had ended while watching two people prepare to document one that was just beginning.

I couldn’t know what this day would become to them. No one could. Right then, it was simply their wedding day.

I think we do something to our memories once we know what happened next. A beginning looks different after an ending. Something we remember fondly can become harder to hold when what followed was painful. Sometimes disappointment becomes so much a part of the story that it reaches backward, changing how we understand the people we were and the choices we made before we knew how things would turn out.

I’ve asked my husband about his first wedding before. He rarely wants to talk about it, and for a long time I thought I was simply curious. But sitting in that courthouse, I wondered if there was something else underneath my questions. I wasn’t trying to compare his first wedding to ours. I think I wanted to know because it belonged to him.

There was a version of the man I love who stood somewhere on a particular day and made promises. There were pictures taken and people who were there. He had thoughts and hopes I will never entirely know because they belonged to him then, not to the life we would eventually build together.

Maybe this is one of the strange things about loving another person. We meet them somewhere in the middle of their life. Even when we have known someone for decades, parts of them remain beyond our experience. There are people who knew them before we did, places we never saw, decisions whose consequences we inherited without being there when they were made. Some of those things become stories they tell us. Others don’t.

I don’t need to make his first wedding beautiful. I also don’t want to make it meaningless simply because the marriage ended.

Perhaps that is what stayed with me about the couple outside the chapel. I had no idea who they were. I didn’t know how they met, why they chose the courthouse, what had happened before that day or what would happen after it. I only happened to be sitting there long enough to notice them.

For those few minutes, their wedding wasn’t yet a story they would tell about their past. They hadn’t had time to decide what it meant.

She was standing outside the chapel in that beautiful dress while he adjusted the camera.

Then my number was called.