I've been in Italy all week, staying at a really fabulous villa atop a Tuscan hillside. We're here for the wedding of my friends D. and A.
Italy is great, just like it was the last time I was here. The food is nice. The buildings artfully terraced across the hilly landscape are breathtaking. Everything has this amazing patina. Their built environment is so much more beautiful than ours. It lifts the spirit.
We wandered around and had conversations about Jane Jacobs, and the social value of livable civic space. We drove around crazily--like the Italians do, which is the only way to do it if you want to avoid being run over--on winding hillside roads laughing, aghast at the drivers whipping by us on short straight-aways with blind corners just ahead. Italian drivers love to occupy two lanes at once. That's bothersome if you have two lanes or more in each direction, but harrowing when the lane-straddler is in the oncoming lane. So far, they've all (perhaps five of them!) swerved back into their own lane in time
The wedding was completely beautiful. We sat on a grassy lawn on a terrace, looking over the shoulders of the bride and groom, far across the Arno river valley, during an early evening graced by perfect weather. It was beautiful. They both looked beautiful, and everything was seemed perfect. Then, they surprised me, and made me proud.
The two of them, a Canadian-Italian man and an Irish-Cantonese woman, elected to include the part of the Jewish ceremony where the newlyweds share a glass of wine, and the groom stomps on the empty glass, and we all shout "Mazel Tov!" It symbolizes the troubles that undoubtedly lay ahead for this newly married couple.
I loved this part, sitting, as I was, three hours drive from the equally beautiful and exceedingly familiar place where my ex and I spent our honeymoon about three years ago. All week, there has been a strong overtone of bittersweetness for me. Lots of the things I see here remind me of what I've lost, and being at a wedding where most of the other friends are straight coupes, I'm constantly reminded of my singleness--my aloneness. I can see them depending on each other, and I feel beset, and alone. Loved, but alone. So I felt really happy being part of a ceremony that spoke to my experience too--that marriage is fraught and challenging, and life is crazy, and it's great to tangle with it as a couple, but let's celebrate real life, and real love, and human striving and suffering and stories instead of the storybook perfection too many weddings aim for.
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