Strangers in the Night: My Parents' 50th Wedding Anniversary

Going to mass was what my parents wanted to do for their 50th wedding anniversary. Though I am not one for ceremonies and have long lapsed in my faith, once I saw the inside of St. Francis of Assisi Roman Catholic Church in Incline Village, I understood. The windows behind the altar offer a view of Lake Tahoe that makes it easy to believe in God.

But my folks were late for the mass.

Blame it on the cable guy. They didn't want to leave him alone in the house where they are staying for the summer, a home very graciously lent to them by my brother in law and sister. It allows them to be less than 10 minutes away from their grandchildren - and gives my brother, with whom they live a good part of the year in the Bay Area, a breather for a few months.

Me, I am typically thousands of miles away in the Chicago suburbs (the one who stayed behind) but was there for the occasion, a surprise visitor there in the pew waiting as they sheepishly ambled into the 5-minute-old service.

The priest introduced Bob and Louise during his homily - a sermon which also included a snippet of Garth Brook's "Friends in Low Places." (Hey, the theme of the service was Jesus hanging out with the likes of tax collectors and His call for mercy and forgiveness. And the Catholics have to compete with those multimedia megachurches.)

"It's more like 500 years for her. She deserves a medal for putting up with me," my dad said. That got laughs, which just encouraged him. So when the priest asked him how they met, my dad told of how my mom was supposed to be a friends date. That friend went on to be a priest. So did the friend's brother.

"They were the smart ones," quipped my dad. More laughs.

Then my parents hugged, and the parishioners applauded, maybe just like they did when my folks married at a church on the South Side of Chicago, St. John's in the Roseland neighborhood if I am not mistaken. There were less than 50 people in attendance that day in the late 1950s.

Apparently my mom's side of the family wasn't too keen on their Lithuanian daughter marrying an Irish guy. My dad was skinnier and nerdier than Buddy Holly, just out of the Army and had no college degree. My mom worked for lawyers. Jewish lawyers, which, as we all know, are the best by their nature. So the only part of her family that came to the wedding was my mom's mom and her uncle, who gave her away. Her dad didn't attend the wedding of his own child.

There are remnants of that kind of thinking in Chicago, where to this day your ethnicity frequently is included in the adjectives used to describe you, an outsider - as in, "Have you met the bald Irish guy?"

Ah, the tribal nature of Chicago, one of the obstacles overcome allowing me (and then my sister and brother) to eventually come into being, me, that bundle of joy with the bright blue eyes in the red vest and bow tie in the picture I have, the smart one who could read a newspaper by the time he was 4. (Sometimes I think I peaked really, really early.)

But from this gene pool I swam:

My dad's dad looked a bit like an Irish Nat King Cole and was known to be the life of the party - and all the good and bad things that encompassed. Sure, he could sing and play a tune on the piano by ear and crack wise. But he couldn't hold any job - and when he did he would scheme things, like bootlegging cigarettes when he worked for the Chicago Park District (Some things about Chicago never, ever change - which is to say, if only my grandpa befriended a Daley.)

So my dad, his two brothers and their parents wound up living with relatives. My grandfather Bill was raised by relatives himself, his own parents in Pittsburgh apparently too poor to care for him. Short and dark, he looked nothing like his portly brother, with whom he had little to do. I only know this from pictures from my folks' wedding album that my brother in law put into a DVD-style slide show.

Still, what I do remember of my dad's father is, indeed someone who could light up a room, who would play tag in a graveyard, and let you run under the hose on a hot day in your underwear and who took you to the "beer store" on the corner. And he died of cancer when I was a small boy - my first tears of real sorrow.

And my other grandfather - well, Joe he came from Lithuania to escape the Bolsheviks. He headed to the States, a brother to South America. A quiet man, he did once chop up a piano because my mother didn't play it any more. And the first few times my dad called my mom, Joe told him she didn't live there.

Still, despite me being half Irish, he loved to feed me smoked fish and rolls slathered in sour cream and listen to baseball games with me in the back of the small grocery store he and my grandmother owned and lived above. And he would take my sister and I on adventures to get the food they sold at their store. That's not to mention the first taste of violent crime I had when their store was robbed at closing time. This was before 9-11 but I ran to call the police - but being scared, forgot the address.

Those and myriad memories swirled about in my head during the mass, the family history on rewind, then fast forward - the visits to the cemetery with "aunts" who lived with us and our cousins; the chocolate milk, potato chip and ham sandwich lunches at Catholic grade school; the "nervous breakdowns" suffered by both grandmothers; the floor hockey in the basement at my cousins; the aluminum Christmas tree; the vacations in the station wagon; the arguments; the Christmas without my father.

I wished my folks would write their versions of the family stories stories down instead of reading suspense novels or doing word search puzzles. How did they fall in love? It still seems a mystery.

As I pondered, the mass went along. I held hands with strangers at the appointed time just before Holy Communion, then shook hands with those around me - the silly part of the modern mass, but also the part I like best, because silly is good and so are awkward greetings because in church they usually at least bring a sheepish smile.

Before the mass let out, the priest asked any visitors to stand up and introduce themselves. Inspired by another couple from Chicago, my dad and mom stood once more. And my dad spoke again telling all how he was staying for the summer to torture his grandchildren. The congregation laughed again. If I were a teen I would have found it all so very embarrassing. Instead I was hoping it would inspire my father to get off his ass and get involved in a place where they haven't heard all his jokes yet, where he could make new friends and be the life of the party - where, like happened at church, someone came up to him and started talking to him just because he was from Chicago, too, which is the Chicago way.

In the restaurant that night where we celebrated, there was a table filled with young women in purple, pink and orange wigs - a bachelorette party just beginning, someone else embarking on her own matrimonial voyage.

I should have introduced this bride to be to my parents. But I was in quiet man mode, all this past somehow tying my tongue, sad and smoky Sinatra songs playing on the iPod in my brain.