Sometimes, if you are really lucky, you can
happen to walk on some solitary backroad in Illinois and, looking up in the
sky, see a couple of floating newlyweds. 
She is thin, blonde and white, almost a cloud
in silk and tulle, while he is tall, strong and dark, with the open smile of
Wisconsin people. They are wafting over the roof of the barn where they just
got married, surrounded by cowboy boots, tears and stifled sighs.
Such an ethereal flight could follow only a
fast, yet not hurried, ceremony, accompanied by the joyful singing of a cousin
or a friend, grateful for the role assigned by the community, equally divided
between Jews and Christians, between Bears fans and Green Bay Packers
followers.
To celebrate the rite there might have been a
man with a bearded, sweet face, who recalled the wise words of some
Native-American, in the praiseworthy effort to keep the right distance from the
two otherwise dangereously unbalanced different creeds.
Ring boys and flower girls, careless about
the major event around them, might soon have grown tired of the serious
expression rehearsed over and over again, shooting amazed or annoyed glances at
anybody close.
Some older guys might have remembered, and
whispered in their neighbor’s ears, the Bat Mitzvah of the bride, meticulous
about chanting the Torah, and perhaps have already depicted the other one, when
the guest of honour of today waits to hear her own daughter struggle with the
same, complex lines she had to struggle with yesterday.
The small kletzmer orchestra has already
turned into a big blues band, involving the guests into a sarabande of sounds
and words they will hardly part from. Even the reluctant, the lonely, the shy
or the widows will not resist to the ancestral call, finding themselves later
on jiving on the dance floor even fiercer than anybody else, along with their
brothers, daughters and grandchildren.
In the enchantment lasted until the sunrise,
when people, animals and things have gone back to their daily chores, guests
might have held their breath until the most important event of all, during
which the officialized couple sits on two chairs and gets lifted up by strong
arms, within a whirl of faces, legs, notes and laughters that will dance around
them until exhaustion.
Some time later the newlyweds, favored by the
numbness cast on musicians and guests, might have stared in each other’s eyes
and, with a nod and a smile, spun over the heads bowed for weariness, ending up
in the pinkish light of the new day, in order to honor the vow made to one
another the night before, from here to eternity.
E.M., Chicago
E.M., Chicago