The Wedding Blessing
It was one of those marriages between ageing hippies who had been living together for decades. These Woodstock refugees tied the knot with their children in attendance. In fact, the couple’s eldest son was best man. A small gathering of good friends and family watched the simple ceremony, the sloped roof of an open-air ramada serving as a chapel.
No one noticed their arrival but two uninvited guests crashed the wedding. It was the father of the groom who noticed the elderly couple sitting in the back row. They were very little, the way some old people shrink until they are composed of very tiny bones. They watched the ceremony silently. She, with her arm slightly intertwined with his, her head upon his shoulder, watched the ritual while her eyes glowed with love — perhaps remembering her own wedding day, long, long ago.
When the wedding ceremony had ended the father of the groom made a few discreet inquiries and discovered that the elderly couple belonged to no one; not friends or family of the bride or the groom — complete strangers. The father of the groom went and introduced himself to the elderly couple. Exactly how old these uninvited guests might be the father of the groom was not certain, but they seemed to him to be very much older than himself and he had a teenage grandson.
It was the gentleman and not the lady who answered the father of the groom, explaining that he and his wife were tourists from Ireland, visiting America for the first time. He and his bride, the ancient Irishmen said with a gleam in his eye, had been in love for nearly three-quarters of a century. The elderly gentleman asked the father of the groom if he might speak to his newly married son. The father quickly went and fetched the groom. The grandson, eldest son, and best man came too, eager to hear what this uninvited wedding guest had to say.
The three men, three generations of one family, approached the elderly couple. The ancient old man greeted the groom by grasping the groom’s shoulders and staring deep into his eyes. Then he spoke in a language that nobody in the wedding party understood. When he was done, the old man relaxed his grip on the groom’s shoulders and took a step back to address the wedding party at large. He explained that he had just delivered a blessing in Gaelic, an old Irish tradition and if the festive crowd wished he could deliver a rough translation. The translation spoke of things green and spring, of misty gowned wraiths, winds that carry pollen scents, winds from other directions that are kissed by the sea, and the blessing ended with a description of a rainbow, the type of rainbow which lives only inside waterfalls.
The groom thanked him for the blessing and shook his hand.
The old man returned to stand beside his bride of so many years, and they instinctively intertwined arms and just before they turned to walk away she spoke for the first time. She smiled, revealing her youth’s beauty in her grin, “Me and my husband were discussing it during the wedding and ye be a leprechaun boy. You may not know it but you carry some of the blood of the little people in your veins. You be a leprechaun.”
Still arm in arm, the little old people walked away, slowly disappearing among the trees, seeming to gradually grow smaller as they vanished in the forest.
It was the best man who replied, teasing softly, “Takes one to know one.”
