#132 By your side.
I was just clicking around facebook today and I found the video of our wedding that I posted back in January 2009. I haven’t seen it in so long, so I clicked play. As I watched this video that I’ve seen a thousand times, it’s like it became brand new to me again. The whole experience. My heart beat funny and my eyes welled up with tears, and I got a little shiver when Ben kisses me at the altar. I wish you could have been there. To see your memories played back to you as music plays is a really magical thing. Time stops and you can be removed enough to see your life as a bystander. It reminds me of a blog post by my friend Elizabeth, where she found this passage by the author Anne Lamott:
“There is nothing more touching to me than a family picture where everyone is trying to look his or her best, but you can see what a mess they all really are. Frozen in the amber of the photograph, you can see all the connections and disconnections, the stress and the yearning. And you can see the pride in their lineage– in that big bottom lip, say, that went from grandma to dad to baby. It’s there on their faces for all to see, and you can see how they love it–that big lip. it’s their immortality… there are pictures of people in my family where we look like the most awkward and desperate folk you ever saw. poster children for the human condition. But I like that, when who we are shows. Everything is usually so masked or perfumed or disguised in the word, and it’s so touching when you see something real and human.”
