A Sun That Won’t Fall

You know how I said recently that the wedding was over? I lied.

It’s still here, much to my surprise. It lingers. It shows up in unexpected ways, even now, a month after the fact.

Marin Headlands: the night before our wedding

It’s in the decor that we brought from home to make the Headlands space feel like ours. (Now, when we are at home, it feels, in some small way, like we are still at our wedding). It’s in the music that reminds us of our ceremony, and in the new dishes and pots and pans that we use every day. It’s in the pictures we got from our photographer and can’t stop looking at, and in the emails and comments we get from our family and friends about what they took away from our wedding.

And it’s this last point, what other people got from our wedding, that I didn’t expect at all. I focused on our wedding as simply a party, but it turned out to be more than that — not just for us, but for some of our guests as well.

My sister and her girlfriend said they came away from our wedding feeling more a part of my extended family. They’d spent the last five years in New York City, five years when they missed the moments that help give one a sense of family: weddings, funerals, birthday parties, baby showers, our family’s annual Tahoe trip. But they found that our wedding and the preparations for the wedding gave them ample opportunity to reconnect with our many aunts and cousins, and to re-establish their place in our big, loud family.

Of all our guests, our friends Amy and Steve made the biggest effort to be there with us: they flew out from Maryland with their not-quite 3 month old son.

Coming out for our wedding meant a first family vacation earlier than they probably felt ready for it. But despite the obvious stress of traveling cross-country with a baby, Amy said that the trip gave her a new sense of what is possible for their new family. Their sweet son did great with all the new people and places, and perhaps more importantly, the new parents seemed to enjoy themselves, too.

My dad is perhaps the last person I expected to be changed by our wedding. He’s practically famous for his distaste of most weddings. He told me once that being at a wedding was like being a sheep, herded here and there. He usually seems confined by what is considered appropriate wedding attire or suitable wedding behavior.

But at our wedding, he relished having a role in the proceedings, and he seemed liberated by his father-of-the-bride status. He said that he felt like he could go talk to anyone. He’s still talking about how at ease he felt at our wedding, and he still seems surprised that he had such a good time. “Don’t you think sometimes that we should have a wedding every week?” he said to me recently.

Of course, the answer is no, I do not want to have a wedding every week or even every year. Weddings are a crazy amount of work. But I have a better appreciation of all the work we put into our wedding now that I know that it wasn’t just for us.

3/50 Project

A good local business anchors a whole neighborhood. A store or a restaurant gives a place character and personality, and it gives people a reason to visit a certain part of town. Think about the places you go when you need to find a gift for someone (for me: Rare Device is my usual first stop) or the places you take people who visit from other areas.

But it’s not easy for local businesses to survive, especially in tough economic times, and that’s where the 3/50 Project comes in.

3/50 encourages people to support the local businesses they rely on by choosing three local stores and spending $50 there (that’s $50 total, not at each store).

It’s also a great way to share what stores you love in your area. In reading other blogs about the Project, I’ve discovered places on the peninsula that I’d never heard of before. Since I’ve been posting about our wedding recently, I’ll start with three great local wedding-related shops.

Recapture

My vintage 60s-era wedding dress is from this little vintage store on College Avenue in Oakland. From the fairly small selection of women’s vintage clothes in front of the store, you’d never know that Recapture has what I found to be the best selection of vintage wedding dresses in the Bay Area. You’ll need an appointment to get to the den of vintage bridal in the back area.

Recapture also takes care of alterations. This was one major concern I had about going with a vintage dress: how do you know who to trust to work on something that is one-of-a-kind? Eva, Recapture’s in-house seamstress, does impeccable work.

Dianne’s Estate Jewelry

When we got my 1920s engagement ring here, the staff seemed as excited as we were. We were showered with congratulations and sent home with jewelry cleaner and a bottle of sparkling wine. You can also come back to Dianne’s to have your ring cleaned or just to have them examine it and make sure its holding up well. And if that wasn’t enough, I found their prices better than Lang’s. If you want a vintage wedding ring, Dianne’s is your place.

Vintage Berkeley

Despite the name, this isn’t another vintage store; it’s a great wine shop with two Berkeley locations. It’s a great source for wines for a wedding or a party because the store focuses almost entirely on wines $25 and under (there’s a small area in the very back with pricier wines). They had lots of recommendations for our wedding, even helping us choose wines that would work with the menu.  In the process of trying their many suggestions, we discovered a new favorite everyday red wine, and both the white wine and the sparkling wine for the wedding.

Other local stores we used for our wedding included: BiRite Grocery (wine), Alcatel (beer), Rare Device (decor), The Other Shop (decor), Clubcard (printed our Save The Dates, invites & RSVP postcards), Blue Bottle Coffee (coffee), Miette (cakes), Heath Ceramics (registry).

Or Maybe There’s No Obligations Now

And when it was all over, we had our life back.

It’s not that we’d necessarily abandoned the things we like to do while we were in the fog of wedding planning. We still went to the farmers market every Saturday. We dropped by 18 Reasons to eat Andante cheese, and found time to eat at much anticipated Nopalito twice. But it felt different. It was like being in school again, when your weekend didn’t really feel like free time because there was still homework to be done.

There was always something else we could be doing, should be doing, in those weeks leading up to the wedding, and so many of the things we did for fun were combined with wedding-related errands. Nopalito was close to The Other Shop, where we’d picked up some wedding decor. We justified going to 18 Reasons because we could also order a case of wine at BiRite.

But this first month post-wedding, our time felt ours again. There was so much we wanted to do that we packed our weeks full. (We were so enthusiastic, in fact, that we ended up with tickets for two different events on the same night.)

We went back to many of our favorite things: going to Blue Bottle’s first day in the Ferry Building to drink macchiatos and lust after their custom-made Heath Ceramics espresso cups. We checked out events like Pop-Up Magazine, and tried new sandwich shops that use local ingredients.

I even made it to a show, my first in at least a year, seeing Blitzen Trapper and Fleet Foxes at the Fillmore. Sitting in the Fillmore’s balcony, drinking beer with Mr. WholeHog as we waited for the show to start reminded me so much of the early days of our relationship. Our first outing together in SF was to see the Shins at the Great American Music Hall and over the years, we’ve seen so many bands together.

Mr.WholeHog has undoubtedly influenced my taste in music, coffee and even sandwiches, but he claims that I gave him a new appreciation for ice cream. And maybe I did, since he was the one to suggest that we go to Humphrey Slocombe one unseasonably warm Saturday.

Let it be known that had we lived in SF, I would never have let two months go by before trying a much-lauded ice cream shop (especially one that makes a salted licorice flavor). I still love my BiRite Creamery, of course, but anywhere that offers “Your Tin Roof Rusted” for $6, and has a sundae called “Hot Mess” is a place I want to frequent. Who doesn’t want a little personality with their ice cream, especially when their ice cream is so good?

Last Minute

On the day before our wedding, Mr. WholeHog got an unexpected text from his friend Adam: “You’re doing great,” it said.

At that point, it didn’t feel like we were doing anything great. We’d just run into traffic picking up music equipment and had likely missed our chance to have a rehearsal. We’d spent the week finalizing beer and wine, finding a shirt and tie for Mr. WholeHog, and filling our living room with tissue paper pom-poms as we attempted to sort out our many decor ideas.

Now that we actually pulled off our wedding(s), I feel OK admitting how much we left to the last minute. But while we were in the planning stages, our to-do list was overwhelming. I felt shamed when someone would breezily say, “Well I imagine by now you’ve got everything taken care of!” I’d think of five or ten things that we hadn’t yet taken care of, things that we hadn’t even made a decision about yet.

At times, it was easier to lie. A good friend is getting married in the fall so I’d use her story as my own.”When are you getting married?” a woman at a make-up counter asked me, a few weeks before my wedding date. “In the fall”, I said casually. “Well you’re ahead of schedule!” she said. It made me feel temporarily less panicked.

In hindsight, though, Adam’s text was true: we were doing great. We just didn’t know then that so many of the details that we put off the longest would be the most memorable.

One of the last things we did was our ceremony music. The night before our wedding, Mr. WholeHog edited down 5 or 6 songs we each loved so we each had an individual mix of music to lead us down the aisle.

Going for music we loved (Beatles, Fleetwood, and Beasties for me) rather than the expected classical selections set the tone for our wedding right off the bat. As I was waiting for my turn down the aisle, I heard Mr. WholeHog’s music start and the whole crowd cheered and clapped. It was clear that our guests were ready for a party.

Beer was another last minute choice: After looking unsuccessfully for a keg of beer from Moonlight or Speakeasy breweries, Mr. WholeHog wandered into a liquor store a few blocks away from our house. It was the day before our wedding, and there, amid all the Budweiser and Pabst, was a small keg of Bear Republic’s Racer 5 IPA. We thought our guests were mostly wine drinkers, but we ended up with over a case of wine that hadn’t been opened. The keg, however, was tapped.

I thought I was ahead of the game with my wedding attire. I found my dress in December, five months before the wedding, and I’d ordered a veil from Etsy two months in advance.

Photo by Jacob Bauch

But the veil didn’t arrive until two days before our wedding. Everything I’d read about birdcage veils said that I’d need to spend some time with it to get it right. The instructions from Etsy said I might have to iron it. Instead, I simply stuck it on my head 10 minutes before our ceremony and my sister pinned it into place. I got loads of compliments on that last minute detail, and it had the added benefit of making me feel like a bride.

Of course leaving details to the last minute is different than leaving essentials to the last minute. Maybe we felt OK putting certain things off because we knew that the location was full of personality on its own, and that our caterer had food and service covered.

Still, knowing what we know now, there’s so much we would have done differently. But part of what I’d change if I could is the fear that we were doing it wrong because everything wasn’t planned out in advance. I’ve come to realize that a lot of weddings — maybe most weddings — aren’t perfectly set up beforehand. A friend told me that she and her husband wrote their vows the night before their wedding. I met someone who decided the day of her wedding that her dress wasn’t right and went out and bought a new dress that day.

Perhaps the real freaks aren’t those of us who have last minute decisions, but those who have “dreamed of this day since I was 6 years old” sorts, those who haven’t left anything up to chance.

Think I’m Gonna Change Up My Style Just To Fit In?

The second time we were married, we were across the Golden Gate Bridge, in the green of the Marin Headlands, with our friends and family.

Our City Hall wedding was so satisfying that I’d wondered, briefly, if maybe that’s all we really needed. Maybe those months we spent choosing a location, designing invitations and deciding what wines to serve weren’t necessary after all.

Photo by Jacob Bauch

But while City Hall was refreshingly simple, it wasn’t personal. It wasn’t really about us. Our wedding in the Marin Headlands was truly ours. We chose the music, wrote our ceremony, and made decorations.

We didn’t have wedding colors or any particular theme. We aren’t religious people, so we didn’t have any traditional hoops to jump through. We tried to simply include what felt meaningful and fun to us. That meant that we had a reading from the Massachusetts Supreme Court decision that allowed gay and lesbian couples to marry, and also a reading from Suzanne Somers little known book of poetry, Touch Me.

It meant that we included our families in our ceremony — our dads MC’d and our moms each did a reading — and passed on the traditional father-daughter or mother-son dances.

Photo by Jacob Bauch

Our caterer shared our love of locally grown food and served a gorgeous spring meal (fava beans! asparagus! artichokes! lamb that even lamb-haters loved!), all sourced from Marin farms and ranches. Our guests are still talking about the food, and many guests told us later that they tried to recreate some of the food at home.

Instead of a tiered wedding cake, we had a selection of cakes from Miette for dessert. (I love that I can go eat our wedding cake any time I’m down at the Ferry Building.) Two of my aunts who were hungry to be involved in the wedding contributed family favorite desserts — Janet’s famous chocolate chip cookies and Mary Jo made her chocolate-peanut butter balls.

Anyone who knows Mr. WholeHog knows how much he loves coffee, so we had Blue Bottle Coffee come in and serve French press with dessert.

Friends who married 10 years ago said our wedding made them wonder, “What would our wedding have been like if we’d waited until we had personalities?” And, ultimately, that was our goal — not to worry about meeting someone else’s expectation of what a wedding is, but to have a party that felt like us, that reflected our values, and to share it with our favorite people.

You Can Have It All

Although it’s overused, I can’t help but turn to that lovely, succinct phrase that marks such a turning point in Jane Eyre:

Reader, I married him.

Actually, I married him twice: once on a bright Thursday morning at San Francisco’s majestic City Hall, and again on Saturday afternoon in the spring-green hills of the Marin Headlands.

Having two weddings was ideal for us. We didn’t have to choose between getting married in the City we love and having a wedding in a beautiful natural setting — we had both. We had both a wedding that took months to plan and a wedding that merely required an appointment made just two weeks prior. We had both a ceremony we wrote and one we simply showed up for.

It also helped me reconcile something that had bothered me in the lead-up to getting married: that the decision to get married and the commitment that marriage requires is intensely personal, while a wedding — the act of getting married — feels so public,  so loaded with expectations and trussed with tradition.

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It felt real to get married at City Hall. It wasn’t an event, it wasn’t trying to live up to some fantasy. It was out of our hands and there was something very relaxing about that, particularly when we felt responsible for so much of our celebration in the Headlands.

To City Hall, we wore clothes we already owned. We went to Blue Bottle Coffee’s kiosk on Linden alley for breakfast beforehand, narrowly avoiding stepping in dog poop on the sidewalk  — a sure sign that we were getting married in San Francisco.

at Blue Bottle on our wedding day

It was wonderfully ordinary but also surprisingly special. City Hall has such a strong sense of permanence and of history. It’s seen a lot. It’s been a crime scene, and a monument to marriage as a human right.

It still makes me think back to February 2004, when people in love waited in long lines, came from miles away, to be married there. The country was at war and it seemed such a grim time, and yet at San Francisco’s City Hall, all these people had gathered to declare their love. It seemed like something John and Yoko would have loved.

Being married at City Hall felt like we were part of that history. We were married in the rotunda, surrounded by our families, and with a bust of Harvey Milk looking on.

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Not every wedding venue is open to the public, and some locations may not continue to be a place you’ll want to visit (the cafe where my aunt and uncle had their first  date, for example, is now a McDonald’s on the grungy corner of Haight and Stanyan).

But I like that we can go back to City Hall — maybe in 30 years, you’ll be here with your kids, my dad said after our ceremony — and remember our first wedding. How after we were married, we walked up Hayes Street, the bouquet of daisies and ranunculus that my mom had made for me marked us as newlyweds, and had sparkling wine and burgers.

And On Back to Springtime

Maybe it’s all the sunlight and the shock of springtime greenery after these (admittedly mild) winter months, or maybe it’s that wedding planning is very soon going to turn into wedding-happening, but these days, I feel like I’m coming out of a fog, as if I’ve been hibernating and am just now starting to be back in the world.

What happened to February? I asked Mr. WholeHog recently. I don’t  remember it. It passed in a flurry of rain and wedding invites, days spent unpacking in the East Bay and desperately missing SF. I realized how overwhelmed I’d become when my mom said, “The wedding is going to be fun”. Until that point, I hadn’t  allowed myself to even think about it being fun. It was just something that needed to be done.

But I’m happy to say that today, at least, I feel giddy. Maybe it’s that all the wedding stuff is nearly done and I feel lighter without that to-do list haunting me. Some people talk about being depressed after their weddings but at this point, I am so looking forward to getting back to our life: to hikes and camping, to cooking and trying new restaurants, to exploring new neighborhoods and planning our fall trip overseas.

Or maybe I’ve got spring fever. The trees on my walk to BART have transformed from skeletal to lush. Certain blocks in our tree-filled neighborhood glow with new-growth-green. There’s just no way to watch plants seemingly erupt from the dirt and trees explode into blossoms not see this time of year as a fresh start.

The farmers market is always my best seasonal reminder but each year, I’m surprised at how early spring produce arrives. In early March, when the trees were still bare, the market was full of  asparagus, fava beans, artichokes and pea shoots. Amazingly, this weekend brought the first strawberries of the year.

With the move and the wedding, our meals have often been simple, but all this bright new produce has led us back to some of our favorite recipes from one of our very favorite cookbooks, The Zuni Cafe Cookbook.

Truly one of the cheeriest-looking dishes is Zuni’s take on carbonara: those bright Marin Sun eggs make for such a sunny dish, speckled with Fatted Calf bacon and green fava beans (instead of peas). With the asparagus, we turned once again to Zuni for the super easy pancetta, asparagus and rice soup. The artichoke recipe takes the most time but it’s worth it: halved ‘chokes are massaged with salt and oil and nestled in a bed of yellow onions, lemon, mint and olives.

Of course, the promise of free time and the good food of springtime help boost ones mood but let’s be honest: a healthy dose of giddiness is just a drink away. And we’ve been doing a lot of drinking these past few weeks (all necessary wedding preparation, I can assure you).

May I suggest that if you are going to procrastinate on one part of your wedding, put off deciding on your wine. We’ve spent many of these pre-wedding nights getting looped on wine. (A taste is not nearly enough to make a decision. You’ll want to know if you like this wine after one glass, and what about after two?). One night, we ate pizza with sparkling wine. I loved that.

The extra wine consumption feels indulgent and decadent and yet the wedding makes this one of the few times in life when drinking can also be considered productive. How can you decide what wines to bring to your wedding unless you try them? So try them all. Try them often. And try them late.

All This Action, No Satisfaction

Last March, a week before Mr. WholeHog and I got engaged, my cousin had her first child, Andrew.

Because Mr. WholeHog and I had been together for so many years, I thought our engagement would be secondary to Andrew’s arrival, but one of my aunts response to our announcement made it clear that my family could handle more than one happy announcement: “First Andrew, and now this, ” she wrote.

This past weekend was Andrew’s 1st birthday party and with it came a reminder about how sweet this all felt a year ago.

In the past few months, I’ve  begun to understand the sighs I heard from my married friends and family members when they reflected on planning their weddings. “I’m just glad I don’t have to do that again,” my cousin said when her sister got engaged. Her sister, a few months before her wedding, told me that she was “really looking forward to the day after the wedding.”

At the time, these comments seemed sad to me. Shouldn’t this be a joyful time? I’d thought. But now that I’m in their shoes, I understand. The planning portion is a challenge, and not particularly joyful at this stage.

I even had a nightmare about the wedding last month. In my dream, the ceremony wasn’t planned, the guests were confused and Mr. WholeHog and I were there in front of everyone, feeling like a stand up comedians who aren’t getting any laughs. It’s stressful right now and the long wedding to-do list can feel overwhelming.

But at least during this trying time, there are pre-wedding celebrations that distract you briefly from the planning and the worry (can we truly pull this off?!). When you are full of self-loathing about putting so much off until the last minute, it helps to be surrounded by people who don’t care a bit that you’ve procrastinated on some fairly major elements of the wedding (like, say, the ceremony).

My wedding shower helped me remember what our wedding is all about: celebrating with friends and family. My family is always ready to party and they essentially create a party where ever they go. My sister planned my shower and she said her strategy was to “keep it simple because the family will fill in the rest.” And they did.

Over dinner and wine last month, my married friends became what Meg at A Practical Wedding calls ‘wedding graduates’ — people who’ve been through wedding planning and lived to tell about it. They told funny stories about their weddings (one friend was dropped on the dance floor by a clumsy dance partner who tried to ‘dip’ her during a swing dancing song) and they also gave sensible advice ranging from “I wish I hadn’t worried so much about what other people would think” to “Ask the photographer to get pictures of you with your friends”.

And during those times when I don’t have family and friends around to distract me and the number of things still left to do starts to weigh on me, I think about what a friend told be about child birth: that when you think you can’t labor anymore, that’s when you’re almost done.

You Read it in the Post and the Daily News

Among the many things I don’t understand or appreciate about weddings are wedding announcements. What’s the point of an announcement? Everyone we’re close to already knows we’re gettin’ hitched (and if there was any confusion about it, we fired off a save-the-date this month).

The announcements in the Sunday New York Times often seem to be an opportunity to brag. There’s always a bride that graduated magna cum laude from Harvard/Yale or a groom whose ancestors came over on the Mayflower. Yawn. I delight in the more unusual announcements, the ones where the bride says something like, “Not to mention that being around puppets is very sexy”.

Given the odd police blotters I cull from my old hometown newspaper, it’s probably no surprise that their announcements are a little different from what you’ll find in the New York Times. The announcement may note, for example, that the bride “wore a handcrafted Celtic-style veil and an off-white, multi-layered Georgette dress that took on an ethereal ‘fairy in flight’ appearance as she rode guests up and down the hill on her brother’s quad runner.”

But if you don’t have a connection to puppets or to the Mayflower, or if you lack a quad runner, how do you make your wedding stand-out? Here are some ideas:

The first rule of announcements is to toot your own horn. But don’t limit yourself to the facts. Say whatever the hell you want. My very favorite in this category is the announcement of the very humble Tiffany and David that stated: “Tiffany is heaven sent, and David is a true blessing from God.”

Don’t we all want the chance to publish something about ourselves that may or may not be true? Think of all the things we could say! “Mr. WholeHog was raised by wolves and Ms. Piggy has smells like bacon.” Or, “Mr. WholeHog walks on water, and Ms. Piggy is a 6.7 on the richter scale.” The possibilities are endless.

You can also use your wedding announcement to confirm your wedding choices. Did people think you had too many bridesmaids and groomsmen? Take a hint from Laura and Bobby who pointed out in their announcement that “Each attendant was so special to the couple that they are very happy with their decision to have a large wedding party.”

Worried people aren’t sure you should be getting married? Zak and Gianna pointed out that they’d shared “a long and ‘amazing’ friendship”. (Putting amazing in quotes makes it much more believeable, don’t you think?)

Lastly, let your crazy flag fly. Let your whole town know that you are on a permanent acid trip or flirting with mental illness. It’s difficult to sum up all the alarming features of this couple’s wedding announcement, but in short:
(1) the couple had a “woodland creatures in outer space theme”,
(2) the bride was at one point “hatching out of a cosmic egg”, and
(3) the couple “donned a spider costume built for two.”
If possible, post some frightening pictures (don’t say I didn’t warn you!).

We Could Slip Away, Wouldn’t That be Better

One of the best things to do after getting engaged may be to leave the country.

A few weeks after announcing our engagement, we bought plane tickets for a long awaited trip to Italy. Every year, we talk about going to Italy. Every Fall, we say, “Let’s go to Italy next Spring!” and each Spring, we say, “You know Fall is really the better time to travel”. And the result is that we never actually go.

Part of the problem was that Italy offered too much to do, see and eat. How does one narrow down where to go when there’s Rome, Venice and Florence to choose from.

Those three cities are just the beginning. There’s also Naples, where Mr. WholeHog’s grandmother is from, and as big fans of Neapolitan-style pizza, going on an Italian pizza tour was certainly tempting. Reading Heat of course meant that now we had to go to Dario Cecchini’s butcher store in Tuscany. Friends returned from a trip to the Cinque Terre, raving about the coast of Liguria; others touted Bologna as the place to eat in Italy. It felt like we’d need a month’s worth of vacation time, since we aren’t the kind of travelers who feel like 2-3 days in a given place is enough time to really get a feel for it.

Unable to choose where to go in Italy, we simply put the decision off. But this year, we took action. We set out dates, bought a guidebook (or four), and found flights. Considering the sorry state of the US dollar and the meager vacation time my company initially provides, the last few years of indecision have actually been a boon: we’ve saved up enough money to go and hoarded my vacation days so that we can take a full 2 weeks (and still have time for my family’s annual stay in Tahoe).

The timing turned out to be fortuitous because Italy offers the perfect answer to pestering questions about a wedding. We simply say, “We’re really focused on getting to Italy right now”.

It’s the truth. Travel planning is daunting for us – perhaps just as daunting as planning a wedding. We can focus on the wedding, if we want to, on the 14 hour flight to Italy. There’s plenty of time.

One thing we already know about our wedding is that it will be untraditional and in a way, this trip is another unconventional step: it’s like going on our honeymoon first.