So I missed the eclipse. It turned out that in early July something equally cosmic would be happening — likewise accompanied by crying, laughing, drinking and a last-minute, nail-biting weather watch — albeit something more local and hopefully far more lasting. I performed a wedding.
In all, I’ve witnessed eight total solar eclipses, from 35 seconds of noonday darkness on a soccer field in Siberia to seven minutes of coronal magic — time enough to drink an entire bottle of Corona and shoot a whole roll of film — on a beach in La Paz, Mexico. The eclipse on July 2 in Chile would have been my ninth. I’d long planned on dragging my family and friends down to the Atacama Desert, where the moon’s shadow would pass directly over some of the world’s leading observatories.
But when our old friends Tony and Millicent announced last fall that they would be getting married on July 6, just four days after the eclipse, my personal calendar stones shifted.
I had taken a paternal interest in their relationship ever since the couple met, at a party at our house on election night in 2012. Tony, a professional juggler and teacher at the New England Center for Circus Arts, had tagged along with another friend. Millicent, one of my wife Nancy’s oldest friends, is de facto godmother to our daughter, Mira.
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One happy outcome was that Mira learned to juggle. Another was one of those unlikely romances you wouldn’t have dared to predict or arrange.
So I couldn’t miss the wedding. Moreover, they planned to marry at the Ashokan Center, a center of music, arts and crafts near Woodstock, N.Y., where I once lived for a dozen years writing books. I quickly rented a big house where a large group of us could stay for the Fourth of July weekend and the event.
A few weeks before the wedding, Millicent and Tony asked us to stand by for an important phone call. I grew briefly worried: Had they changed their minds and were calling it off? Or maybe they just wanted Mira to be in the ceremony. But it was me they wanted, to officiate.
I’m not particularly religious, although I grew up in the Pacific Northwest, in a typical Scandinavian upbringing that included being dragged to a Lutheran church on the occasional Sunday. The only time I use the word “God” is when I’m quoting Einstein, who used it as a metaphor for the mysteries of nature.
Then again, I’ve been know to digress on the subjects of free will and the death of the universe, perhaps earning myself a reputation for gravitas, at least on paper. Also I am, shall we say, seasoned.
“You are on the older side among our friends,” Millicent wrote in an email, when I asked why me. “And are a very good as well as successful writer. You even have white hair! (kidding).”
Also, their first choice, an old friend of Tony’s, had politely declined.
I am not an accomplished nor even a happy public speaker, but I will agree to anything if it is far enough in the future. And I knew it could be done. I’ve attended weddings presided over by ministers ordained online by the Universal Life Church and even stranger-sounding outfits — Dudeism, anybody? Such ceremonies are entirely legitimate, documented in the Sunday weddings section of this very newspaper.
The Universal Life Church website was easy to find. (Their slogan: “We are all children of the same universe.” Who could argue with that?) Completing my ordination as a minister took all of 15 minutes, and was free. For $39.99, I ordered the Classic Wedding Package, which soon arrived in the mail: a booklet about weddings, sample wedding certificates, name tags, bumper stickers and windshield placards proclaiming me a member of the clergy. I could now perform baptisms and funerals and start my own church.
The pamphlet advised that my job was to make sure all this was legal in the eyes of local county and city ordinances. So I went to the City Clerk’s office in Manhattan, where Tony and Millie had obtained their marriage license. After sitting in a lobby for several hours, watching couples and their friends come and go in wedding dresses and formal attire, I was assured by a clerk that my signature on the license would be fine.
Now I had to think of something to say. The material was familiar, I soon realized. My day job largely involves writing about things that are dark, deadly, vast and doomed, and reminding readers of the many ways that humanity, Earth and even the universe could die.
A black hole could swallow us. An asteroid could fall crashing from the sky. The Higgs field, which permeates space and determines the properties of elementary particles, could sigh and shudder, causing us and the cosmos as we know it to flicker out like a dream.
But the other half of my job consists of reminding people of all the wondrous, even miraculous, things that atoms and elementary particles can do: form stars, planets, cat videos, the aurora borealis, us.
Just because these things are not permanent doesn’t mean they aren’t worthy of our awe and love.
I quoted Einstein only once, on the illusory nature of time: “For those of us who believe in physics, this separation between past, present and future is only an illusion, however tenacious.” We live on borrowed energy that will be repaid one way or another. All we have is now.
Early July is prime gardening season in the Hudson Valley, when Edens bloom behind eight-foot-high deer fences and my Siberian irises would blaze in deep blue glory. The flowers will be gone by fall, but we don’t feel defeated by that. We plant and nurture them anyway, for their transcendent, transient and fragile beauty.
Naturally, as I was about to pronounce the couple man and wife, it rained. The moisture killed my microphone, so I had to shout out the last words. The photographer made a point of taking a close-up of the raindrops on my eyeglasses.
And so it went for that complex, ecologically compromised and very delicate bloom called marriage, a hopeful flutter in the local cosmos. Life and love are to be nourished, and I was happy to hold a watering can.
