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.