During our engagement, Lauren and I had two deaths in the family – my dad and her brother. We’ve been thinking of ways, not to remember them, but to enjoy them in their absence. Most of the methods out their have something to do with pictures – set up on a table, on the bouquet, around the neck, in a program.
Mostly, though, we have settled on a purple dragon. Lauren’s brother was known for driving around town with a purple dragon tied to the top of his car. Therefore, clearly, the most fun way to incorporate Jon’s memory is to tie a purple dragon to the top of our wedding get-away car.
I’m still a little stuck on how to do my dad. A couple years ago, I discovered Victorian mourning jewelry. Apparently, it was all the rage back in the Victorian day to cut a lock of hair from a dead loved one and weave or braid it into a locket or a bracelet. There is an antique store down the street with a locket in the window. It has a shock of white hair inside, but it’s not woven.
Lauren thinks it is the most disgusting thing in the entire world, but I’m strangely attracted to it. And I think it would look great with my dress. On the other hand, it’s 125.00 bucks and doesn’t really have anything to do with my dad and I would have to spend time and money turning it from a locket into a pendant.
Maybe I could tie a stuffed Pomeranian to the dragon. One of my dad’s last dogs was a Pomeranian. Try to imagine a sunburned, sandy-headed house painter, in his cargo van, with the ladders on top and a fuzzy little fawn-colored frou-frou dog ever at his side. They were quite a pair.
One of my favorite stories about my dad was from the days when John Muhammad and his son were running around shooting people. There were reports that they were driving a white cargo van and the police set up road blocks to pull over every white cargo van every time another sniping incident occurred. My dad was a housepainter and drove a white cargo van. One day, he got pulled over by a uniformed police officer toting a machine gun who, upon seeing the Pomeranian, just smiled, shook his head and waved my dad along.
Surely, no serial killer would be in possession of such a cute dog.
So, now, I just need to snag an inflatable purple dinosaur, a stuffed pomeranian and a car for getting away in, as well as some shaving cream and beer cans.
1 comments:
that's a really lovely way to memorialize your father and her brother. i like it! i like that it's fun, rather than depressing. my fiancee, kris, and i have also been thinking about this- my father passed away last november, and we want to memorialize him in our wedding, too. so it was really wonderful to read your entry about the same thing. one way we're doing it is by using some of my inheritance from him to go towards paying for the wedding. the other thing we're doing is this: he loved pickles. whenever anyone would come visit him, the first thing he'd say was never "hello" but "would you like a pickle?" -- and then he'd reach into a giant jar of pickles he inevitably had lying around. so we're going to have a jar of pickles that says "would you like a pickle for dad?" on our buffet. :) i think it's a kind of nice, fun way to remember someone. those are always the best memorials.
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