Nuptials in New York

It had been a long and lovely rainy Saturday in the city for my family. I had been up in Harlem at a baby shower while the rest of my family was at the American Museum of Natural History, the littler kids giddy at being taller than the hairy Australopithecus Lucy and her "husband", who walk blithely arm in arm through the Early Human Exhibit. Later, we'd all met up in Chinatown at a favorite spot, Shanghai Café, which was only blocks from the church where my husband and I had gotten married, and the apartment where we'd lived when our first son was born.

Once in the car after our meal, the day came to a lull. We inched along through traffic on Canal. I watched a red double decker bus, looking like a ferry boat, approach on the other side of the street. Despite the rain, its top deck was entirely full, with most of its occupants wearing ponchos that looked like white garbage bags. I could see over a dozen faces smiling broadly up at the sky and out towards the street, beaming at New York. Tears came pricking to my eyes.

Almost ten years ago in 1999, on a blue-eyed early September day that was so clear it seemed it could break, our wedding guests had been ferried on double decker buses from our ceremony to our reception. So many people dear to us, many never having met, magically confined together on the top deck, smiling and glamorous with New York City's downtown streets gleaming in the background, the vivid blue sky behind them like a strip of opaque glass, are among the best snapshots of the day. The weather was magnificent: part autumn, part summer, twinkling, crisp, and containing New York: part heartbreak, part joy, part end, and part beginning.