Wedding, Schmedding

My parents are an interracial couple. What matters is what happens next

For the past two years, my mother, a one-time English professor, has had dementia. In that time, my father has become her full-time caretaker, and when he joins her at a day program for Alzheimer’s patients at the local Jewish Community Center, he has noticed an interesting phenomenon. The other caretakers, mostly black women, steal startled glances at a truly incongruous sight: an old white Jewish man taking care of an old black woman.

When my parents married in December of 1966, they were more than incongruous: they were illegal. (Though not in Brooklyn.) It was a year before Loving v. Virginia, the landmark case that struck down all of the laws banning interracial marriage.

Black women steal glances at a truly incongruous sight: an old Jewish man taking care of a black woman.

In the pictures from the wedding party, my mother’s family is out in force. She sports a velvet red mini she sewed herself; my Aunt Cherrie is in sea-green chiffon; my great-aunt Virgie in lime green lace, and my twice-divorced grandmother, perhaps significantly, in black. My father’s sister Francine is also there (in this case, in a leaf-green A-line), as are all my…