Higher Than Any Bird Every Flew

I’ve been thinking a lot about my wedding.

I planned the entire thing in an hour while I was bored at work. I remember going to visit the priest, Father Kenneth, to see if I could get married at the church about a block from my office after learning a Catholic had to get married inside a Catholic Church – not the Sheraton two miles down the street as I had outlined on my Reporter’s Notebook.

Father Kenneth began reading from a mental punch list.

Bridesmaids?

Just one.

Groomsmen?

One again.

Formal?

No, an afternoon wedding.

With a mass?

No, definitely without.

Photographer?

I’m working on that one.

Flowers?

Any recommendations?

Music?

For some reason, it never dawned on me that we’d have to actually hire someone to play the organ and sing. I obviously hadn't been to many weddings. The priest put me in touch with an organist, who picked all the songs she wanted in her wedding.  And I only knew one wedding singer, a woman my age, 24, that I worked with in the newsroom. I didn’t think she much liked me, but I honestly didn’t know of another soul to ask.

I remember when I approached her with my request, her demeanor changed and she told me, all serious like, “I’d be honored.” Until that moment, I never thought of it as such and I remember feeling a pang of guilt that this exchange  suddenly felt so uneven.

Then she got a new job three hours away and had every reason to bail on me. By then, lots of people were. But she came back that Saturday. She knew only two songs, one “The Wedding Song” and the other a Dan Fogelberg number. Because of her, we got four Dan Fogelberg albums that Christmas.

The priest had warned that we couldn’t have secular music. So an hour before the ceremony, I had to break the news to him about our singer’s limitations, but he seemed more irritated that he’d yet again have to hear that mushy Mendelssohn number.

Penny missed a few high notes. She missed some of the lyrics too. A mutual friend of ours wanted to say something snarky, but he thought I loved how Penny sang and kept his mouth shut, even hours later when he was drunk as a skunk.

I learned when I returned to town to pick up my wedding photos that that day and evening were a very big deal for Penny.  I saw her a few times over the years, the last at an investigative reporter’s conference in Boston in 1998. And every time I did, I introduced her to friends as “this is the woman who sang at my wedding.” I could tell she was still very proud of it.

Penny had many, many fond memories that likely overwrote that weekend in July 1986 – her marriage, the birth of her children, a fulfilling career as a journalist and then professor. But I hope that in the days before she died last week after losing her battle with breast cancer, that she maybe remembered how much she contributed to my big day, even if it took until now for me to appreciate it.