We were in New Jersey last weekend for Heidi’s wedding.
Heidi is the youngest child of Arlene’s first cousin Diane. She’s the only person of that generation (other than my own kids) whose date of birth I know. We were staying at Diane’s sister’s house in Albuquerque when the phone call came to say she had been born, and it happened to be Arlene’s and my tenth anniversary.
This was a wedding we had been looking forward to for a long time. Maybe we knew about it long in advance, maybe it was because a lot of people Arlene doesn’t get to see often were going to be there. At any rate, it finally arrived.
Arlene had made a print as part of the wedding present, working from a photo of a wedding two generations back, when Heidi’s grandmother Lee was just the age Heidi is now; it includes pictures of Lee at that age, Diane and her sister Mira as small children, and Heidi’s late grandfather. The print wasn’t completely dry as of Friday, so Arlene didn’t want to shrink-wrap it until the last moment. It took longer than we anticipated to do that, so we didn’t leave until close to noon on Saturday. There was lots of traffic at the Sturbridge exit from the Mass Pike, lots of traffic just before the Tappan Zee, and a fair bit of traffic just before the exit to the Garden State Parkway. Arlene was on the cell phone with Millie several times with progress reports and a request for us to stop and buy corn for supper at a farm stand between I-80 and their house. The farm stand also had lots of pumpkins and apples. We didn’t get any apples. We already had a basket of ones I had picked last week in the trunk for Millie.
Gena’s youngest kid, Baylor, was at Millie & Joel’s house when we got there. Just about as soon as we had our bags out of the car, Gena pulled into the driveway with her two other kids.
After supper, and after the Gena and all the grandkids had left, the four of us in the elder generation played dominoes. I kept drawing the double blank, something uncannily improbable like five or six times in a row, and got several non-starter hands. I hadn’t been fond of playing dominoes to start with.