The Taco Traveler

Preface
This isn't really an essay, but in order to keep my streak going (two marriages still intact after two wedding essays read) I'll call it one anyway. It's words, after all - take from it what you will. Al and Yvette of Sailfisher are the friends I made (along with Lou and Lydia on Shiloh) originally at Isla Isabela, between Mazatlan and San Blas. We've been buddy-boating since, more or less, with a two week gap at La Cruz when I last went to visit the boys in Florida. Like the thing begins, I wasn't asked to write something, but I knew the ceremony would be small, and short, and informal, and just in case they wanted something personal in the ceremony, I put this together while sitting on the boat, smoking a cigar and having a Basil Haydens. I pulled them aside before the ceremony and explained that they could just have it and take it home, I could read it as a toast afterwards, or I could read it during - their call. I offered a preview or to read the whole thing (brides usually don't like surprises, do they?) but they decided to have me open the ceremony with it without hearing it first.

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For Al & Yvette - 3.13.2008
Bahia Santiago, Jalisco, Mexico

I wasn’t asked to do this. I speak today because of a need to express for these two what many of us feel – to acknowledge for all of us the comfort in this union that can’t come from a state or a church’s approval but comes from our observations, and from our observations of their observations.

I was speaking to Yvette the other night, and she brought up Bob Dylan’s “Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door,” and it doesn’t matter what the song says – some of you may remember it differently - what Yvette saw in that song was this: “You’ve got heaven, right here with you, you know? Why do you go on seeking heaven?”

As I write this, I can look out my hatch and see the hillside burning – it’s a mountain behind Manzanillo and if you consider the distance and really calculate, the flames must be 45 feet tall. And these two… after this celebration they will return to their 46-foot boat. Al will load the dishwasher in his special and only correct way. They’ll don their headsets so they don’t need to yell. They’ll pull anchor and they’ll sail away, Yvette’s Bronx flames pulling the boat along, and Al’s cool slowing it down, ensuring they just keep moving, but not to anywhere, really. They’re already there.

Wedding essay #2 in the Old Stuff Series. Delivered April 18, 1998 for my little sis. Coming up on that 10 year anniversary, which also means ("My - wow - 30 years of experience...") that I'm coming up on 40. Uhhhhh.
 

Would you like to use this essay in your own wedding (or a wedding where you're reading)? You may use this (edit the names, duh) but please credit tacotraveler.com in the program. However, if you're a single guy hoping to get lucky at the wedding by appearing sensitive and literate, you can say you wrote it yourself.

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The Beauty of a Moment

For John & Rochelle - April 18, 1998

Twice in my life now I've woken up literally on the tops of mountains. Not Rainier, McKinley, or Everest, but mountains, anyway. And what's interesting about this is that on both occasions I arrived at the top of each mountain way after dark - nearly midnight, which makes waking up all the more special. The sunlight hits my tent, I hit my mental snooze for a few minutes and let myself thaw, and I unzip the door of my tent to take in for the first time what I couldn't see the night before: the magical views that make the hike worth the effort. Snowfields, waterfalls, rock formations, once a grazing deer....

What I'm getting to is the beauty of a moment, but I suppose I don't feel real comfortable just telling you Remember the beautiful moments, or Seek out the beautiful moments, because that would imply that I know something that you don't, which is ridiculous; we all have, and recognize in our own way, our own special moments. By moments I don't mean entire events like the experience of this wedding, but instants. Instants that are not just a look, but also a smell, a taste, a touch. Feelings you'll remember forever, like when time stopped as you were holding your child or your grandchild and he looked up, blinked, and smiled in recognition. Or maybe for you it's the moment when you said what these two will say in a few minutes: "I do." I have my own examples: I remember being airborne on a baseball field, parallel with the ground, and the line drive hitting my mit for the third out in the final inning. I remember sitting on my surfboard, Del Mar California, as the sun went down, a pod of dolphins swimming by. I remember saying "I love you" for the first time. Twice.

For a couple years now, I've been enthralled with a particular lyric by the group Counting Crows. It's from their song "Long December:"

The smell of hospitals in winter
And the feeling that it's all a lot of oysters, but no pearls
All at once you look across a crowded room
To see the way that light attaches to a girl

In the song they use that last line as an epiphany to illustrate that no matter what else is happening - what troubles or distractions winter brings - whether it's real hospitals or theoretical pearl-less oysters, the sudden discovery of a beautiful moment can cure, can get you through a long December, can make the bad moments inconsequential.

So today we're here witnessing a beautiful moment in the lives of John and Rochelle. Rochelle has that certain indescribable bride's beauty right now, light not attaching to her but emanating from her. And John (if he's clean shaven) has a certain glow of his own. So maybe they're experiencing one of those beautiful moments every time they look in each others' eyes tonight. We're lucky enough to be present for that rapid-fire assault of beautiful moments, which, in a way, makes them our moments, too.

Now is just a moment and then it is gone. All we can do is snap mental pictures of nows. My - wow - 30 years of experience tells me the trick is to occasionally leaf through those mental pictures of your beautiful moments. I can't pretend that's the answer for everyone, but I am more comfortable now, so I'll say it: Remember this moment. Snap a picture of now.

Prologue: This is my worst piece of non-fiction, I think (my fiction is crazy-stupid-bad). But I was under a pretty strict time constraint. Anyway, the couple is still together, so there's that. In fact, I'm proud to say that every marriage I've ever written an essay for is still intact. Both of them. Can Shakespeare say that? Elizabeth Barrett Browning? Anonymous? The Corinthians? Baaaah!

Would you like to use this essay in your own wedding (or a wedding where you're reading)? You may use this (edit the names, duh) but please credit tacotraveler.com in the program. However, if you're a single guy hoping to get lucky at the wedding by appearing sensitive and literate, you can say you wrote it yourself. But you may have better luck with my other wedding essay, which I think is better and proved a bit luckier for me. Good luck, dude.

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Soul Mates

For Scott & Robin - September 21, 1996

What I'm about to say may be one of those things that seems like a revelation to me, but is something everyone else already knew, like the time I called a friend late at night to say: "You know the refrigerator brand, Frigidaire? I get it: frigid air." But the concept of a soul-mate has somehow eluded me. . . in more than just the tricky grammatical sense. Here's the Frigidaire part: Scott and I have lived together; we shared a house; we were house-mates.

But I'd never thought about the term "soul-mate" very deeply until Scott & Robin tasked me with writing something for their wedding. I'd always just thought: "Soul-mate, someone you're destined to be with forever," as if these two separate souls are drawn together by some cosmic force, and as if that "coming together" completes the soul-mating. But that's just how the term is used on Oprah. That's the generic interpretation. It takes two people like Scott and Robin, making the commitment they're making today, to remind us of the grammatical roots of the term: "Soul-mates:" they share one soul. Combine those grammatical roots with the significance of their wedding bands: They each provide a one-hundred and eighty degree arc, a half of the circle that makes their love complete and whole. "Soul-partners"

I can't answer the broad questions like: "Who gets to use the soul if Scott goes fishing but Robin's going to see a foreign film?" or "Why is it that while talking with one soul, Audrey Hepburn, on the Ouija board, I didn't sense a bit of her soul-mate there?" But maybe I have an idea or two: To carry the house-mate analogy a little further - when Scott and I shared that house in Kirkland, we still had other interests, worked different jobs, cooked separate meals. . . . And when I visited friends in California and Scott went to North Carolina to see family, we still paid rent on that shelter we knew we'd eventually come back to.

Is the simple answer then, that soul-mates share that soul only during the time they're together; and together, here, on this earth? Maybe. Regardless, I still believe we all either have known, know, or will know that person, someday, whom we can call "soul-mate." Let's just hope we're all as lucky as Scott and Robin, standing here in front of us after having found their soul-mate early in life, about to make official a promise they and many of us already knew: that they'll be house-mates, soul-mates, and partners for the rest of their lives - possibly longer.