Yipes. It’s been hard to get back into the habit of updating. I’ve got plenty of things I want to blog, but I don’t have time to make each entry the eloquent, multimedia masterpiece essay I’d like it to be. And then there are all those back entries from this summer that are now so far past that blogging about them seems a bit ridiculous. Oh well.
Last weekend Julie and I were in Ithaca, NY to celebrate her brother Joe’s marriage to his lovely now-wife Ilene. It was a wonderful weekend. Julie and I met in Westfield, ditched a car, and drove to Ithaca late Thursday night. Friday I had to stay and work in the hotel while Julie (and Elena) helped put the final touches on decorations and bouquets and the like. The rehearsal dinner was really really delicious (family-style at ZaZa’s Cucina), and we came home with three huge doggy-boxes of leftovers.
Saturday morning started very gray and dreary, but turned into a gorgeous sunny day by lunchtime. The ceremony was held after lunch in beautiful Sage Chapel on Cornell’s campus, where, it turns out, my great grandparents were also married. The ceremony was lovely: as Joe had envisioned, it was sort of a concert with a wedding sideshow. A string quartet played before the ceremony; Julie and two of Joe’s other friends sang for the processional (Ilene looked beautiful in her dress, of course, and the chinese-patterned red bridesmaid dresses were really cool, and of course they guys looked great, too); and there were at least three other musical performances, including another piece sung by my own wife, and a piece that Joe composed for Ilene for this occasion performed by a men’s choir of at least 30 people, all friends of Joe’s.
The reception was held at a beautiful B&B type place about half an hour outside Ithaca, with a huge green lawn overlooking a lake. Joe’s best man, Ken, gave a really excellent toast — it pays to have a playwright as your best man. Larry G. played and sang for the parent-child dance, and Marcia G. once again made the wedding cake (which was once again beautiful and delicious — and this time I got to eat some at the reception!). And the evening ended with a moonlit serenade on the lawn outside, a reunion of Joe’s college a capella group.
Sunday, after the brunch to send Joe and Ilene off to their Hawaiian honeymoon, Julie and I visited my grandmother and step-grandfather (but he’s been my step-grandfather all my life, so I don’t really think of him as ’step-’), who live in a retirement community in Cayuga Heights (which is basically an extension of Ithaca). It was a wonderful visit full of sharing of family history: paintings done by my great-grandmother and my grandmother, a visit to the plaque commemorating the founding of Cayuga Heights by my great-great-grandfather, and a retelling of the story of Anne Marie Louise LePine Paddock Treman, my (if we counted correctly) four-greats grandmother who escaped a slave rebellion in Haiti in 1803 at the age of 7 or so…but that’s a story that deserves its own entry, and a bit more research on my part. Ack! Another into the backlog!
Also on my list of things to do in my nonexistant free time is set up Gallery on this website, for sharing photos and videos of such events. Can’t promise that will happen soon, but I’m trying to get to it. And tomorrow it’s off to another wedding — Congratulations Lela and Joel!