Old School Family Starting Techniques

 

The old lodge of the Peter Strauss ranch in the Santa Monica Mountains, as it would have looked in 2003, when I attended a wedding there. The lodge was later destroyed in a forest fire.

As I stood at the end of the row ---the high school reunion, Class of 1983--my concentration on the Divine Liturgy going on in the sanctuary was interrupted by a pssst from across the aisle. I turned my head and saw my friend Randy, who had been the student body president of our class, looking at me with a grin, and next to him were his wife Heather, two years behind us in the class of 1985, as well as their two sons, one of whom was the groom, and beside him his bride, in her home parish church.

Because this was not the wedding yet, there were not in a special position, but were sitting back in the same rank as us. Now it was a full reunion, it seemed. Randy is the lynch pin of the group in fact, as everyone else is still a group who gets together for events and trips on a regular occasion, despite living on different continents, while I have been estranged from all of them during these years, except for Randy, who kept calling me. Heather and I are the outliers, politically and culturally---especially on a certain health freedom issue that was greatly divisive among us.  Heather is very vocal and unashamed in her opinions. I can speak frankly with her. She was my daughter in a high school play, when I was a senior and she was a sophomore. 

I was at her and Randy's wedding 21 years ago in the Santa Monica Mountains. They had not been high school sweethearts but had encountered each other by chance years later while living in Los Angeles. I as drafted to be part of their ceremony at the last minute. From the bag by the altar, I had picked the rock labeled "love"and read it aloud to the guests. Heather could not believe it, as I was the last to go, and there had been many rocks left in the bag. She had stooped in her wedding dress to pick up the rock I I had put down, to verify I had read it correctly, which I had. 

After that ceremony, as we played group frisbee among the trees of the National Park Service property, the new groom had announced in a whisper to his old high school friends that his wife was already with child. The boy would be born the next spring and was the young man standing next to them now in Modesto with his bride. He waved back at me in recognition to me. We have been corresponding for some time privately. We talk about classical studies and scientific issues.

"How young they are," must have been the words of so many who heard the news of the couple acrosss the aisle from me, set to become one flesh in the eyes of God later that day in the same church. 

"So young! Still in college. Two years to go." With dissuasions they did receive? Perhaps none?

I am greatly in favor of it, I would have said, had anyone asked, which no one did. It's very old school---everything they told our generation not to do. Yet it is how my parents made their family, which endured despite much financial turmoil and drama, with three children and grandchildren before they died. It is how most people did it.

Civilization depends on it, I believe.