Wedding at the Koi Pond

Twelve white plastic chairs were lined up in a single row along the border of the koi pond in the Japanese Garden next to the tea house built in honor of the sister city.  A concert cellist named Diego, son of Argentinian emigres who arrived in L.A. just in time before the disappeareds, played baroque accompaniment to the breeze and babbling waterfall.  The solos were at once serene and mournful.  This was a spare wedding, thinly populated.  The mother of the bride, tightly corseted, wore a long deep blue gown. A gem matching and uncertain quality hung prominently from a white gold chain on her ample breast.   On her arm was a man to whom she had been married twice, though not currently.  He called her his wife.  The bride called him her mother’s boyfriend.  He said they were separated.  It was not a consistent story, though he was a MENSA and very entertaining.  The groom’s mother wore a handwoven dress from Mexico adorned with Mexican amethyst and silver jewelry she had inherited from the mother-in-law she never met who had acquired same on New York’s Fifth Avenue.  A hand woven shawl from a highland village draped her shoulders.  The MENSA man exclaimed she was more Mexican than the mother of the bride whose family had migrated from Guerrero in the last generation.  Assimilation can be everything to some.  Accompanying the mother of the groom was her husband number two.  The father of the groom who had never remarried was also in attendance.   The best man flew in from the mile high city to be with his best friend from infancy.  Three young women in stiletto sandals adorned with sequins that exposed French manicured toes attended the bride who emerged from the Japanese tea house alone to the accompaniment of the mournful cello, her heels sinking into the grass as she tip-toed to the area where the officiant, the groom and the single bride’s maid awaited her.  Many who loved these two were missing from the scene.

There had been a long debate about who could or would be in attendance.  The bride, tall, lanky, and quixotic, went back and forth about who to include or not, and the groom to be was compliant.