Our youngest daughter Amy married her long-time boyfriend Lukas this weekend in his childhood hometown of New Lebanon, New York.
A proud moment for me was walking Amy down the aisle. As everyone else gathered in the Ruins at Sassafras Farms to await the groom and bride, I enjoyed a little quiet Daddy-Daughter time with Amy alone, waiting to see Lukas and his mother heading along the path as a signal for us to start my walk to "give her away."
The ceremony was beautiful and perfect, with sweet, heartfelt vows that included some laughter and brought both Amy and Lukas close to tears. They're obviously very much in love with each other. A few friends read passages from books about marriage and love. The officiant was Lukas's lifelong friend Topaz, who is not in that business and had never done a wedding ceremony before but did a fantastic job.
The story of how we had arrived at that rustic wedding ceremony among fall-colored leaves begins well before Amy's second broken ankle playing roller derby that delayed the nuptials from late August to early October.
As a child, Amy was always ready to experience new people and places. As I mentioned in a brief toast at the wedding dinner, I remember well taking her on an after-dinner stroll through Carlsbad one night, stopping occasionally for ice cream or donuts as we passed various live music venues and including one with a belly dancer. As we walked back to our hotel, Amy looked up at me and said, "I love to go for a walk in the nighttime with you, Daddy."
Amy always welcomed the unknown, saying yes to life anywhere it appeared. That took the form of meeting many friends, often going to their houses. Their parents universally loved her, and she loved the new people and experiences. An early friend was Timothy J. Mouse --- his actual last name is Evans --- not J. Mouse, but that's what I always called him. He lived a couple of houses over when we lived in Carmel Mountain Ranch. He had a bit of a British accent, because his mother was from London and his father from South Africa. His mother Helena would make them scones and tea, and for many years she was an Anglophile. Timothy attended Duke University and now is in some Wall Street-type business in New York City. I stay in touch with his dad, who was a golf buddy when we lived in Carmel Mountain Ranch.
There were other friends whose houses she visited, including Korean twins Esther and Jasmine, who I will always remember for saying 'scusting if something grossed them out (something we still do), Gracie Westbrook, the little sister of Jay's best friend Landon who lived directly across the street, Aubrey with whom she went camping and on many other trips, and a little boy in kindergarten through second grade named Kyle Covey, whose name stays with me for unknown reasons. I believe he was with Amy in a class taught by Miss Downs, whose saying when someone didn't get exactly what they wanted is still used in our family. "Oh well, a treat's a treat!"
She made several lifelong bonds in Carmel Mountain Ranch, including Kimberly Drahl, who I know went on to play softball and had a boyfriend last I heard, Sophie who had three or four sisters and a partial pony-tail hairstyle that we would occasionally use for Amy and always called "Sophie Hair," and Sophie's other sisters, who would all join in the garage of Briana Cara, who lived across the street, to do homework after school together.
There was a lot of laugher in that garage, so it was definitely all hitting the books, but I know Amy emerged with straight A's (which she continued her whole life through graduating Summa Cum Laude from UConn with a double major after just three years on the Storrs campus, and I think the others did well too. Briana always wanted to be a singer, and had some success with it, but Briana's baby sister Olivia is now a big social media star with youtube vides where she talks rapidly about random topics.
Chelsea Wagner lived a short drive away, but she and Amy bonded quite tightly at school. Her mother Louise was the leader of the Brownie pack that Amy joined, and the girls spent many fun days together. When Louise became pregnant, she asked Chelsea what to name the baby, and Chelsea said "Amy," which sounded good to Louise and her husband Charlie. I would call them best friends until Chelsea's family moved to Rochester, New York, which is the area Charlie and Louise grew up. They still live in upstate New York but didn't attend the wedding. Chelsea also went into the communication/journalism field. Both Chelsea and Amy are now married and in the general Rochester area.
Michelle Regrut was very close for a while. Her family, who lived up the hill from us, took Amy along to several events, including a Christina Aguilera concert. Our families went to Palm Springs together on one weekend trip. Michelle graduated from UCI and is now married and has a baby. If we had not stayed in the San Diego area, perhaps Amy and Michelle would have been roommates in a college dorm and on a completely different life path.
Instead, we moved to Manhattan Beach for Julie to accept a very lucrative job at El Segundo-based CSC, something that proved to work out very well for our family financially, although we hated leaving a home we all loved.
Amy also gave up her ballet classes, where she had a good friend named Cassie, and piano lessons that she recently started when we moved. Her baby grand piano was soon sold to make room in the new garage, and she never took up keyboard lessons again, or who knows what musical horizons she might have found?
Once in Manhattan Beach, however, Amy was too busy with new activities, and soon she had accumulated another group of fantastic friends. Increasingly it became obvious that these friends all had unique viewpoints and a different niche of activities that gave Amy the chance to explore different ways of life.
Not knowing where we would be living as we transitioned to the area by living in a hotel weekdays and returning to Carmel Mountain (where we had our house on the market) on weekends, I talked our way into Amy attending Pacific Elementary, home of the Panthers --- "Once a Panther, always a Panther! --- because we were pretty sure we would buy a house in "the trees" section of Manhattan Beach. "Walkstreet" houses by the beach cost twice as much, even if we liked them more and could have been able to stretch to buy with Julie's higher salary, if we were sure we would stay.
At Pacific, Amy soon had a lot of great friends. Her class did a musical called "Lewis and Clark" that had a cassette tape for practice at home. We played it every time we got in the car, so often that our family still knows and often sings parts of the songs. In our trip to France recently, some might have heard me sing softly, "Oh my name's Napoleon Bonaparte, and have I got a deal for you. I'm in danger of being blown apart..."
Several times I drove Amy over to play with Alexis Alfano, a new Pacific friend, when we still lived in our rental house, and she seemed destined to be a new close friend like Chelsea, Michelle or Briana. We moved a year later to our new house that we purchased. It happened to be a few houses down the street from Alexis, making her a perfect best friend candidate. Alexis was very much like Amy, I thought. In our backyard pool --- actually, in the hot tub part warming up --- Alexis one day told Amy that she was her best friend. Amy didn't respond reciprocally as expected, making me feel angst on behalf of Alexis, but I think that single best friendship is just too exclusive of a commitment for kids, who should remain carefree throughout childhood and have many best friends.
Before we bought that house, however, we lived for a year in a rental house in "the sand" a few blocks from the beach to get feel for the area before buying, and there she became friends with the very artistic Jamie Dunn, and spent a lot of time with her family, including attending a Rolling Stones concert with them. Jamie now lives in Jackson Hole and is a talented artist.
Among many new friends from grade school to middle school to high school was Laura Gran, who introduced Amy to "The Gilmore Girls," which was set in mythical rural community of Stars Hollow, a New England village where all the neighbors know each other's odd quirks and darkest secrets. I surmise that show, which our whole family loves, set in motion the longing in Amy's heart to go to school in New England, and no matter how much I pushed for UCLA and later for Cal Poly San Luis Obispo or one of the other state universities like Santa Barbara or Irvine, Amy had a vision of where she would go. Laura is still a good friend, and in fact Amy flew to California to attend her wedding after we moved from Redondo Beach and no longer could provide a home base, but with a new marriage and baby, budgeting time and money for a cross-country destination wedding out in the countryside was not possible for them at this time. Still, I see her as instrumental in arriving at Amy's New England fall colors wedding.
Dozens and dozens of friends from classes, stage performances in musicals like "Once On This Island" in Middle School where I still thought she was the brightest start in her smallish part, choir, drill team, school newspaper and many other activities kept her busy, and much of the time I spent with Amy through the years was getting to her various activities and friend "play dates."
Laura Ledesma, Jessica "Michigan" Bundy (daughter of Bill, who became my good friend prior to his passing away unexpectedly), Blaire, Danielle, Matt the actor who would ride home with us talking to his agent, Julia Luthringer, Allie, Grace Bracker and many more played their parts on the stage of Amy's life cast. If we had stayed in our Manhattan Beach house, Amy probably would have remained in closer touch with all of them, and many are still in her facebook friends list, so still not totally out of touch, out of mind. For me of course, they're all very recent memories, because as we get older, time compresses because each passing year is a smaller percentage of our life.Amy spent a lot of time at the house next door, when sisters Stephanie and Rachel Krugman moved in. That became the new homework hub, similar to Briana's garage in Carmel Mountain Ranch. Among other friends who sometimes studied there was Haley, a tall girl who was always hungry and loved that we gave her the drumsticks from out Thanksgiving turkey, which our family rarely ate at the big dinner and so had available as leftovers. Younger sister Rachel would sometimes come over and stand in front of our TV while giving an excited explanation of something fascinating to her, tilting her head back and forth like my dog Alvin used to do when he sat in front of the TV and was happy everyone looked at him, so I called her Alvin.
Both of those high-energy sisters girls are now happily married. Stephanie flew in for the wedding from their new home in Nashville with her husband Collin and baby Nora. They're a very sweet, lovely family, and it was very nice to see Stephanie again. It's easy to see they are loving parents.
There are really just too many close friends from Manhattan Beach to go into more detail, because I have no doubt I will leave out someone who is very important. Her friend Chase, who Amy has visited a few months back at her new home in the middle Pennsylvania where she moved to accept what I understand is a very rare position as a literature professor, could not make it to the wedding because of a conflicting party, though the fact that she lives an 8-hour drive away from New Lebanon probably made that an easier choice.
Perhaps no other person was so instrumental in getting Amy to that wedding in New England as one of her quirkiest friends, Paige. My immaculately accessorized mom found it quite disconcerting that Paige regularly wore very mismatched, wildly-patterned socks and on occasion mismatched shoes. Paige left high school in Manhattan Beach early to attend Simon's Rock in a rural part of Western Massachusetts, not far from New Lebanon. She not only stayed in touch with Amy but regularly visited.
When Amy moved to New York City to take a journalism job at Curbed.com, Paige soon became her roommate in a Harlem apartment with other Simon's Rock alums. All of those roommates attended the wedding. Paige was there with her partner Abby, and Ariel came with her partner Meredith, with whom we enjoyed some extended conversations about dolphins, wildlife and journalistic perspective impact on stories. The fourth roommate, Rachel, came with her boyfriend Oliver.
Rachel has become what I would call Amy's best friend, though there are always several contenders, it seems. When Rachel accepted a job at "Popular Science" after having been Science Editor at "The Washington Post" for years, and she recommended Amy for an opening there. Amy left what would have been my dream journalism job at "Travel & Leisure" to take that job. Working together solidified their friendship.
More significantly, Rachel introduced Amy to Lukas, who also attended Simon's Rock.
When Rachel began dating a tall German-American engineer named Oliver, it was natural that they double-dated with Amy and Lukas. During the Covid-19 pandemic, Amy acted as officiant --- having gone through the necessary requirements to become a minister --- to perform the wedding ceremony for Rachel and Oliver on Amy's balcony of her Jersey City condo.
Oliver and Rachel like the modern building in historic downtown Jersey City so much that they moved to Amy's building, and that made the pandemic much easier to tolerate in their own little "bubble."
Of course, Oliver and Rachel were at the wedding. Rachel gave a long, uproarious speech about their time together. It is obvious why she is a professional writer with a published non-fiction book endorsed by Bill Nye the Science Guy.
Oliver's friend college Chris and his girlfriend Catherine have become part of the Jersey City friends group, and they attended the wedding. I had a chance to chat with Catherine, who was an opera singer but decided she preferred being a top-level bartender in the New York metro area.
As it turned out, I would guess about half of the attendees at the wedding attended Simon's Rock or were their plus one. Living on the east coast and spending a few days in New Lebanon monthly, Amy and Lukas definitely devote more time with them than people she grew up with, and that definitely skewed the very young guest list for a venue that could seat no more than 50 guests maximum using the configuration Amy and Lukas visualized.
Some folks from Amy's college days at UConn also attended. It was great seeing Grace Vassington, one of her roommates in the honors dorm there. During college, Amy visited Grace in Paris when that petite, perky friend spent a semester studying abroad there. Now with a PhD in literature, Grace works for the VA in Virginia in communication, which she finds very rewarding. We were disappointed that another roommate, Laura Hatchman, who is now a doctor, and her husband John --- her boyfriend in college who also attended UConn ---- were unable to make the long trek from Tennessee where they now live busy lives due to not having enough free time in hectic schedules that includes splitting time between two homes in different parts of the state.
UConn Journalism friends Brian Zahn and Joe O'Leary also attended the wedding. Brian and Joe both work in journalism in Connecticut, so they drove over together in one car. Brian works for a daily newspaper, while Joe now works in communication for the Connecticut Democratic Party, where he strives to shape a less polarizing message to voters. Joe told me some interesting stories of his times hanging out with Amy, including when he received two tickets to see Neil Young and Crazy Horse in New York City and brought the ever-enthusiastic Amy along. Brian seemed to know every song, often lip-syncing the words while dancing energetically in perfectly synchronized steps.
I believe the only "boomers" among the attendees that kept the average age from being about 33 were Lukas's parents Silke and Winfried, Silke's brother Bert, and Christina and Yaqin, who are the parents of brothers Sherdyl and Elias-John. Apparently Amy and Lukas spend a lot of time at their house visiting their sons, who have been among Lukas's best friends for years, so they made an exception for the young theme. They lived in Marin County, California, many years ago, but said they weren't Deadheads (Grateful Dead fans). Their sons are nice guys who helped out a lot.
I didn't have a chance to get to know Sherdyl's girlfriend, but Elias-John's girlfriend Larissa made the delicious and beautiful four-layer, apple spice wedding cake. I was amazed to learn it was vegan, and even more so to learn that she is not a professional baker. I enjoyed talking to her, though perhaps she remembers it as me boring her with tales about a Julie Child bio-drama TV series I'd seen on a plane flight. Who can explain it all?
Sherdyl was about as close a wedding coordinator as they had, and Elias-John did one of the readings in the ceremony and made a long drive to pick up food in Albany, among other tasks for this wedding where most of us played some kind of role beyond attendees.
Another set of brothers from Lukas's childhood were Raven and Topaz. I expected from their names for them to be kind of hippie guys, and their long hair seemed about right, but I thought Raven would have jet black hair rather than blondish. Those were their names from birth --- or should I say middle names? --- so I guess it was their boomer-aged parents who had that new age mindset initially. I felt a sort of ;ate '60s vibe in New Lebanon, with the peace and love of that era certainly in play, and at this celebration, there was the dance party attitude from the disco era, carried on by the next generation. The parents danced, too.
Raven was there with his girlfriend, who again I didn't see much, but I did speak with him a bit. Topaz flew in from Nashville, where he works with at-risk kids. Topaz did a great job as officiant at the wedding, taking his job very seriously and delivering flawlessly.
Lukas's younger sister Rabea made a long, loving speech at the wedding dinner. She recently became a medical doctor, and she lives in Germany with her husband Mahmood, who is working on a novel as a hobby, among other things.
Neighbor Ayla (pronounced I-la), the next door neighbor to Lukas's childhood home and a close friend of Rabea, attended with her artist boyfriend Austin. Interestingly, Ila's father's name is Dallas, which they say motivated her choosing him. They are a striking artistic-looking couple, but rather than the bon vivant dilettantes I imagined, they were down-to-earth and warm. In fact, they really put in Herculean efforts to rinse and load stacks of dishes into the dishwasher after the rehearsal dinner.
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| This is Amy, not Lea, with Nils, not Lukas |
Other young family members were Lukas's sweet cousins Nils and Lea are about 20 and 22 years old, respectively, who came with their dad Bert, who is Silke's brother. They all flew in from Hamburg, Germany, where they live and stayed at Silke's house, which is why Silke and Winfried stayed at the Ruins at Sasafras which is less than a half mile from their house. Bert's wife and other son could not get away from work. Nils is a student, and Lea a physio therapist, which to be clear is a medical professional rather than a masseuse. There was some discussion as to whether the translation from German would be physical or physio therapist. They have cheerful countenances that made me think they looked like they could be in Oktoberfest traditional clothing and be featured in ads for Germany and Austria.
Of course, Amy's brother Jay and his wife Sasha, plus sister Gina and her husband Laszlo and our granddaughter Emma, also attended. I was very happy when Jay came over to our cottage when Julie, Gina and Sasha were over in the stone house helping Amy get primped for the ceremony. We've missed seeing him as much as we did in pre-pandemic California before we moved away.
I managed to spend some time to speak with most of the people in attendance, learning a little about each of them as the celebration went from Friday's dinner to the meditation, actual wedding ceremony, wedding dinner and dance party on Saturday.
This was a dancing bunch of thirty-somethings, and they were all having a lot of fun jumping energetically on the dance floor, which became so covered with dancers for every song that it was hard to know who was dancing with who.
Back to the subject of how we arrived at this wedding ceremony and taking that in a literal sense as applied specifically to Julie and me, we were invited to a goulash dinner at Lukas's parent's house on Thursday night, we found ourselves driving through beautiful Harriman State Park due to traffic problems on the freeway. The changing of the leaves reflected at every turn of Seven Lakes Road in mirror-like water surfaces we passed, creating an amazing fall drive, but it ended up taking about an hour more than the ideal time to go for a planned afternoon hike with Amy.
We headed directly to the home of Lukas's parents, Winfried and Silke, where we supposed to join Amy on an early afternoon walk. It was almost 4 by the time we arrived, and we were unexpectedly welcomed for coffee and cake by Lukas's family, including his parents, sister Rabea and her husband Mahmood, Silke's brother Bert and his kids Lea and Nils, and Lukas's 17-year-old German Shepard Schätze (Shotzy). The garden space that Amy had cleared intrusive bitterroot bushes (very stickery plants) during the pandemic lockdowns by a couple of people, and at the wedding dinner, Lukas's dad said it would forever be known as Schellenbaum Garden, though I don't seem to have a photo of that.
We were soon on our way to Schätze's Pond, which we had often seen in Amy's Instagram page as her dog-walking destination. The pond was an easy walk from Lukas's childhood home, catercorner across the street rather than out in the middle of the woods as I believed.
We had a room booked at Hilton Garden Inn in nearby Pittsfield, Massachusetts, so we headed over there to check-in, drop our bags and freshen up. We also wanted to bring nice red and white wines for dinner, so we picked some up in Pittsfield and headed almost immediately back for goulash. Silke also made a vegan bean dish for Amy, which I had before having a small dish of goulash. It was all delicious. Silke and Winfried also hosted another tasty meal on Sunday morning for members of our family and theirs with bagels and custom cream cheese, other cheese, and eggs scrambled with shrimp.
We also enjoyed nice meals at a long table along the back wall of the stone house at Sasafras Farm, with lovely views of the forests adorned in orange, red, gold and green leaves and distant farm fields. Amy and Lukas had shopped at antique and thrift stores for months finding unique vintage plates and drinking glasses of various shapes and designs to use as dinnerware for our meals there.
On Friday night, we had several large pizzas and vegan Indian food. UConn friends Brian and Joe arrived well after nightfall and were quite hungry after their long drive. Given the task of getting them from the party area in the ruins to the stone house kitchen, I erroneously took them down a lighted path from which we could not see the stone steps going up, forcing us to backtrack to a better route. When we reached the kitchen, it turned out that almost all of the food was gone, but Brian was able to scavenge a rather carb heavy helping of Indian food and the last slice of pizza. What was left had dairy, tomatoes and bell peppers, which Joe cannot eat, so he must have been starving by the time the party ended.
The dinner on the wedding night was delicious, though of course serving close to 50 people with diverse diets at once makes it hard for food to be piping hot. We took our plates into the kitchen in order around the table and served ourselves buffet style. There was beef steak sliced so as to be taken in the proper amounts and some kind of lentils, I believe, as a vegan entre, and plenty of vegetables.
After everyone was served, I was asked to kick off a series of toasts. I wasn't sure how long anyone would speak, as I knew when I gave toasts when honored to be selected as Best Man for three of my best friends when we were much younger, toasts were only a few words long, maybe a paragraph at most. I started in talking about going for a walk in the nighttime when Amy was little, and for some reason flashed to when I walked on the beach with her on one of those visits when she came alone to Redondo Beach when we still lived there. I think she was attending a bridal shower for either Stephanie or Laura while there, but in any case, this being Amy, she had gone around to visit lots of her friends who were still in the area. Anyway, when we arrived at the Coffee Cartel in Redondo's Riviera Village, where I had never been because I have perfectly good coffee at home, I learned Amy had visited that cafe so many times with friends during this short visit that she exclaimed she was "Mayor" on some app that measured how often you go somewhere, apparently, which in my clouded memory was the title of "queen."
At that point I realized I was going down a rabbit hole nobody could possibly understand and felt I had been talking too long, especially in front of mostly people I barely knew and with whom I had more chance of embarrassing Amy than making a good impression kept going. As it turned out, it would have been permissible to go through memories of her childhood friends, which go well beyond what is in this lengthy blog, but I raised my glass to congratulate the couple and sit down. It just didn't seem right to go on and on about Amy when frankly I didn't have much to say about Lukas that wouldn't be obvious to everyone there. He's earnest, intelligent, kind and loves Bundesliga Futbol, beer, his community, his family and Amy, though I'm not sure in what order. I mentioned that most of the time I have spent with him was skiing in Montana, where we mostly ski down, and then ride up the lift, sometimes in the same chair. I was going to say that he at first seemed to have a gangly style, but I realized that was simply adjusting for being tall, as he was actually quite coordinated and thought out his turns and path down the mountain to be ergonomically efficient, as I guess can be expected from an engineer.
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He is always willing to push a little beyond but not too much. That makes him a fun travel partner for Amy. When he did come to Redondo Beach with Amy, they spent a lot of time on the go visiting her friends. He and Amy learned to surf in Manhattan Beach on one trip, again showing that willingness to get out there and do his best. We're hoping they'll visit more as a couple in Ardmore, now that we're closer. It wasn't much to say, but I should have fleshed out the skiing comment a bit in my toast.
In any case, Winfried, Rachel and Rabea spoke for considerably longer in their toasts, and the ladies, weighted their talks more heavily on Amy, so I needn't have been concerned about balanced time after all. Going first, it is hard to know what will come afterwards, and I didn't want to go on too long. Silke read a long poetic passage as the last toast at the table, though another friend (I believe one of two Chris's attending) played "Danny Boy" on a kind of Celtic flute and then sang in a nice baritone, substituting Lukas-boy for Danny-boy in the lyrics. Then the dancing commenced and didn't stop until the 11 PM music curfew was reached.
Anyway, blah blah blah, and the next thing we knew, it was Sunday afternoon, the day after the lovely nuptials, and I was playing my guitar as the last few items were set up for a buffet potluck party for the neighborhood folks in New Lebanon. When I said I was going to play my guitar, Julie recommended I play the guitar quietly and not sing. I compromised by playing softly and singing softly, which for the most part was ignored by everyone, which was probably good, because when anyone pointed a video camera at me, I lost my attention and forgot chords or words I know by heart.
Before I forget, many of the photos in this post were taken by our son Jay, and the rest by me, except a few by Julie. They are not the professional photographer, so please know they are not the official pictures of the event. Thanks to Jay, or I wouldn't have had nearly enough snapshots here to balance my lengthy monologue.
For the drive home, we took the freeway, which was shorter but definitely less beautiful though not without beauty, for sure.
I think the wedding turned out exactly as Amy and Lukas imagined. The weather had a bit of chill but was literally picture perfect, after 10-day and then 5-day weather forecasts that promised rain that fortunately never materialized. Had it rained at all, it could have gotten quite muddy in the wedding venue by the creek and on the dirt paths from the brick house. Instead, prayers were answered, and it was a beautiful day for a beautiful event marrying two beautiful people.
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