Sunday, May 11, 1969. Mother’s Day.

Friends, beautifully dressed, are drinking and chatting.

—Gustav Mahler, The Song of the Earth.

MANDRYKA: Here is a table. We will have supper.

ADELAIDE: Moët-Chandon, half tart and half sweet—that’s what it

was at my engagement!

—Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Arabella.

Novelist Anita Diamant, author of The Nice Jewish Wedding, observes

about Jewish matrimonial customs, “The Jewish wedding ceremony ends
with a famous bang. Stomping on a glass is one of the best-known features
of Jewish weddings. Traditionally, the groom does the deed. The fragility
of glass suggests the frailty of human relationships. Since even the
strongest love is subject to disintegration, the glass is broken as a kind of
incantation: ‘As this glass shatters, so may our marriage never break.’”

At age fifteen, I served as best man at my sister’s wedding. The

wedding’s cost strained our family’s resources, but my father
insisted on an impressive affair, no doubt to impress his relatives.
And so a fashionable wedding was had. For my groomsman
services, my brother-in-law, Eddie purchased for me a thank you
gift: a phonograph recording of Gustav Mahler’s symphonic song
cycle based on Chinese texts, Das Lied von der Erde (The Song of
the Earth).
At the wedding reception, I was seated at the head table of the
ballroom together with family members. When we completed our
meal, I remained sitting alone, smoking a cigar. My family had
left the table by that time and had begum mingling with guests.
The wedding photographer approached me and remarked: “There
are a lot of girls here. Why don’t you talk to them instead of
sitting alone smoking a cigar?” I took his advice and proceeded to
chat with my sister’s female friends. I eventually made it to the
dance floor.

After the affair, some of the wedding guests returned to our

house, but a jammed front-door key lock blocked our immediate
entry, though my Uncle Leon’s lingering wedding intoxication
yielded amusement as he repeated, “I have the key! I have the
key!”

That evening I rode with my parents, together with Aunt Zelda

and Uncle F., to the Philadelphia Airport to see my sister and her
newlywed husband off on their honeymoon, a one-week stay in
Miami Beach. During the car ride Aunt Zelda turned to me and
said, “Wouldn’t it be nice, Gary, if you got a job, saved up your
money, and took your mother on a vacation to Miami Beach?”
My mother just looked on.

My sister and brother-in-law returned to Philadelphia the

following Sunday, May 18. We had a small gathering at my
parents’ house that included Uncle Louie, my father’s older
brother, and his wife. My mother had a bottle of champagne on
hand. My sister had bought me a gift. It was a men’s jewelry box,
the lid of the box decorated with an antique map of the world
from the Age of Discovery.