We attended a wedding yesterday, in Alameda, between my partner’s older son’s wife’s sister, and a man from a non-Catholic family, who had converted, and gotten baptized a year ago, in order to marry into my partner’s older son’s wife’s family, a Vietnamese family, that is resolutely Catholic. Got that? The ceremony was held at the St. Joseph Basilica in the middle of Alameda, led by Catholic priests, and went an hour and 15 minutes. So many of their rituals must be rote by them, performed and recited over and over again.
This particular ceremony, no doubt designed by the intended couple, was modernized. There were no separate vows, but rather a common vow read out by one of the priests, with a near-simultaneous ring exchange. Still, lots of songs, hymns, recitals of prayer, and audience responses of “Thanks Be to God”. With the Eucharist at the end, members of the church were invited to come forward, while others could remain in their seats. The groom’s family remained in their seats. As we did.
After an interval, the wedding party gathered at a restaurant in Emeryville, Hong Kong East Ocean Seafood Restaurant, a place we have been to several times and walked past many more times, on walks out and back on that Emeryville peninsula.
All of this was similar to a couple weddings in recent years, on my partner’s side of the family, including Y’s son James’s. As it turned out, as I had not realized, the priests who conducted this ceremony were the same ones who had done James’s wedding in Fremont six or seven years ago — because they’re part of the Vietnamese community, which both James and Daniel married into.
And as it happened, at the reception, Y and I were seated at a table along with a couple sets of elderly grandparents, and the three priests from both of those ceremonies. From James’s wedding, there had been a gap between the wedding and the reception, and Y and I hosted a party of sorts at our house, up here in the Oakland Hills. Those three priests had come to our house. I remembered them, they remembered me, or at least the one: Fr. Tho Bui, SDB, who was seated beside me at the reception. We chatted about local things, restaurants and whatnot. (Certainly not about politics or religion). He is a charming man, and he and another of the priests got up to perform Karaoke.
The whole event was well funded. The dinner was lavish, with eight or nine courses, and bottles of wine and Hennessy XO were on every table. The entertainment was a DJ and a Karaoke machine, which only a few people used. Y gave the groom a red envelope. In return, in effect, we snagged a bottle of Hennessy XO, only one-third empty, to take home along with leftover rice and black cod and marinated beef. The bride’s father gave it to us and insisted.
There was a retinue of three or five photographers running around throughout the ceremony and the reception. I was tempted to ask one of them, are all weddings the same?, from your perspective? And, did you get fed? All together, the events ran from 2pm to 10pm at least. But I didn’t get a chance to chat with any of the photographers.
OTOH, I did ask two 20-year-old kids at the groom’s family’s table if they were twins. They were. I wish I could have thought of a clever question to ask them, something like, Is there something you’d like people to know about twins that no one has ever asked? But I didn’t think of anything. I’d already had a bit too much of the XO.
The entire weekend since Friday has been rainy. It rained off and on through the wedding/reception day. It might not have been perfect weather, but perhaps it was memorable. The photo above is what Y took from the restaurant window, in a break of the rain at sunset. Is that the bride out there? Maybe. Let us think so.
