Letter To A Bride-To-Be

By Roger Rosenblatt

The day you were first presented to the world, I wanted life to be perfect, and your arrival did nothing to discourage the wish. To the contrary: one look at your beginning, curled up like a comma in the hospital crib, and I was certain that paradise, never lost, did not have to be regained. Come Saturday, I will feel the same way, though the whole idea of your wedding is still a little hard for me to grasp. That scene in Father of the Bride when Steve Martin sees his grownup daughter as a five-year-old explaining that she is engaged to be married is sort of what I'm going through now.

Except that I'm a bit tired of the routine comedy that attends being father of the bride. Here's a joke I've been living on since the date was set: "I've learned the phrase 'And that's a very good price.' I ask them, 'What's a bad price?'" It earns the appropriate level of laughter.

But to tell the truth (and letters are for telling the truth), I have never minded anything about this wedding. The man you're marrying, a father's loss of daughter, yet another rite of aging--they have all been cool with me. As for the bill collectors, they'll get paid eventually. What are they going to do, take back the wedding?

My old great teacher, Kelleher, said that whenever a girl child is born, and she looks up and sees her father peering dreamily into the crib, one word forms in her mind: sucker. I have never minded that either.

What I want to tell you, in fact, is that, counter to supposedly normal expectation, I am delighted with every aspect of this event, and I'd be pleased to see it last a few more days, perhaps a year. One reason has to do with ceremony. You remember Yeats' lines in "A Prayer for My Daughter"--"How but in custom and in ceremony/Are innocence and beauty born?" I like the idea that all these contributing professionals--the gown person, the cake person, the flowers person, the food person, the tent person, the music person, the God person--are coming together for an ancient purpose. They each know what to do. They know how things are supposed to be.

Every piece of the ceremony they create is wholly, gloriously unoriginal and gains its stature only as part of a long, repeated past. Imagine that. Our first dance together will be the first dance ever.

And there's another reason--friends. Yours, ours, especially ours. One of the rewards of getting older is to be able to gather friends for a happy time and to look at faces one knew when they were as young as yours. The best prize for all of us is to see our children grown into adults we admire and like. How the others managed to produce such impressive progeny is a mystery to me, but I take full credit for all that you've become.

Which brings me to my final reason for looking forward to this shindig--you. Weddings portrayed in fiction always quake with an undercurrent of grave apprehension. The right She is about to be confined to the wrong Him, or vice versa, and the air screams with alarm as the clergyman calls out for somebody, anybody, to declare why this marriage should not take place.

Would it have been better in The Graduate if the church door had held, and Dustin Hoffman had not been able to burst in on the scene and whisk Katharine Ross away? In which circumstance would the damsel have been in greater distress? Does love really conquer all? That, I always thought, was the point of the movie.

Yet another way to look at a wedding (the way I prefer to look at it) is that everything will be as good and right as it is hoped to be, and that this inauguration of a joined life will be perfect. Why not? I know that it is unrealistic to think like that, but reality is overrated. Who in his right mind would not opt for paradise before the fall, Eden pre-snake?

There is a lot in life that's perfect, after all. Perfect pitch. Toss enough perfect pitches, and you have a perfect game. Ask the Yankees' David Wells. What should one strive for if not perfect justice, honor, truth? These things do not exist except in perfect states. While I'm at it, add perfect love and happiness. Why should you not have a perfect marriage? You yourself are heaven.

On Saturday, the weather will be perfect; it is perfect for all weddings. The hors d'oeuvres, I am told, will be perfection.

And I, of course, will play the perfect fool. I will cry as I did at your older brother's wedding, and as I will at your younger brother's, when it comes to that. I cry at the weddings of perfect strangers (they can be perfect too). Don't mind me when I cry. It's just my way of enjoying myself.

When you take my arm, and we begin that awkward stately walk toward your husband-to-be, I will envy him only one thing. He will be able to see you coming toward him. He will behold you in your brightness, confidence and wonder, as you cause everyone to gasp in amazement--just as you did the day you were first presented to the world.