After the wedding, real life goes on

The Boston Herald

BEVERLY BECKHAM

OK, so I'm a sucker for sentiment. Plunk me down in front of a carousel on a hot summer day, give me some cotton candy, let me hear the calliope and the yelps of excited children and I get all filled up inside, although I may know no one, although I may be among strangers.

Give me a seat at a recital. Let me hear children sing. Put me behind a school bus and let me watch as the bus stops and the kids spill out, and I get a lump in my throat.

I love tacky greeting cards with mushy rhymes, and old movies that make you cry, and country western songs full of longing and loss, and married couples who still hold hands, and though these things are too sweet for many, like frosting on a heavy cake, they are for me the reason for the cake.

I cry at births, at christenings, proms, graduations, every time I go to Disney World, and every time I see a bride.

I didn't cry when I saw the brides at South Shore Plaza last weekend, however. They didn't get to me because they weren't real. They were part of a special wedding show, so they couldn't move me to tears.

Not at first anyway.

I walked around the mall with my daughters looking at all the booths set up for potential brides and mothers of brides, booths full of lavish wedding cakes and embossed invitations and beaded crowns with gauzy veils and albums of wedding photographs.

You get caught up in this sort of thing, even when you're too old to be a bride; even when your oldest daughter is, you hope, too young; even when you are simply a spectator. Because it's fun pretending - pretending to choose the china you'd like to have at a formal dinner, if price were no object, the menu you'd like to serve, the gown you'd like to wear, watching all the pretty young girls in white with their handsome Prince Charmings.

We had not come to see this show. We hadn't known about it, so walking into it was like turning the pages of a newspaper and falling into a fairy tale.

When the music began - a band called Sound Investment played in the place where at Christmas Santa Claus charms children - the fairy tale seemed complete. The band charmed the crowd. Babies sat transfixed in their carriages. Toddlers swayed to the slow tunes and bounced to the fast ones. Their mothers stood or sat, inhaling the familiar songs that must have made them remember their own not-too-distant weddings; and the old people, mostly women, sat on benches and smiled.

We smiled, too, my daughters and I, as the lead singer, Grace Greene, who has a voice you could listen to forever, sang "Don't Get Around Much Anymore."

"I want her to sing at my wedding," my older daughter whispered. Clearly, romance was in the air.

Then the band played "Could I Have This Dance for the Rest of My Life," and on a raised platform a girl in a wedding gown waltzed with her handsome young groom, and the crowd watched and yearned.

I looked around then, and it seemed sad suddenly that a wedding, that any one moment, should be the culmination of a person's dreams. It was such a set-up for disappointment because if you had the perfect wedding, you ached for it all your life, and if you didn't, you ached, too, because it was a constant regret.

The pair was beautiful yes, but fake, like a plastic couple on a wedding cake. Reality was what was around them: Mothers juggling babies, their jackets baggy and their pockets stuffed with tissue and pacifiers; a young man in a wheelchair; an old couple, both with canes; ordinary people in ordinary clothes doing ordinary things.

I cried then, not because of sentiment but because of the lies that accompany all the big moments: the lie that the moment should last forever; the lie that the moments played out in the spotlight are life's most important.

They are not. The Wedding. The Championship Game. The Play. The Performance. The Victory. All these things pass. It's not as if after you whisper "I do," you get to live happily every after. As if when you've given your best, you never have to try again. As if when you win once, you win forever.

"I can't wait to get married," so many young girls say. But what they mean is they can't wait for the dress and the flowers and the party and the gifts, the attention and all the applause.

These things are but a moment. The flowers die. The parties end. The guests go home. And life goes on.

That's why at weddings people cry; and that's why at shopping malls, they pause for a moment, to listen to love songs, to watch a bride and groom dance, to remember their own dreams, and secretly yearn.