A Great Weekend

I'm just now back from a great weekend at Lake Tahoe, where I performed the civil wedding ceremony of two great young people, Christopher and Melissa, both in their early thirties. The ceremony was outdoors on the very shore of the Lake, with the Sierra as the backdrop.

About thirty minutes before the ceremony, a nervous Melissa fretted that the weather didn't look very good. And it did not. About twenty minutes before the ceremony, it began to rain, and Melissa calmed herself by accepting that she wouldn't have the outdoor wedding of her dreams. Then, just moments before we were to start, the rain stopped and a patch of blue sky appeared overhead! Melissa had her dream wedding after all.

The couple has an eclectic group of friends and family, ranging from a social worker from Bristol, England (the maid of honor) to a Cal Tech Ph.D chemist born in Yugoslavia, and all sorts of other interesting people. One woman, a school psychologist from Southern California, told me her father's story as a Polish resistance fighter in World War II and his subsequent flight from Poland under the Communists. I talked to Melissa's mother and aunt about their father, grandson of German immigrants, who married their Mexican mother just before World War II. Christopher is a descendant of the French Negroes of Illinois. All things considered, the wedding was a great example of the variety of this American family to which we all belong.