1.) John and I went to Charleston for John’s nephew’s wedding. Or maybe I should write for our nephew’s wedding? The truth is that I’m not really sure what to write because although the second choice is technically correct, it doesn’t feel true. The truth is that there are a total of twenty nieces and nephews between John and his siblings. I’ve only known John for nine years, so all but five of those nieces and nephews existed before I ever came into the picture.
Together with their Uncle John those nieces and nephews manufactured a lot of memories surrounding family trips, triumphs and tragedies. My arrival heralded a new dynamic in John’s relationship with his sister and brothers, his brother-in-law and sisters-in-law, and all those nieces and nephews. The brother and uncle everyone knew disappeared and was replaced with someone who had to consider his wife, and in short order his children, too, before he could carry out the sort of commitments he once did. Maybe this is why only some of John’s siblings’ children occasionally refer to me as their aunt, and I don’t have the type of relationship with them that their other aunts enjoy.
Whatever the case may be, the truth is that it took me a long time to feel comfortable around John’s family, and that eight years into our marriage and three children later I still don’t feel like a true part of the Moore family. That may be my own misinterpreation of our family’s relationship, I admit, but I’m just saying.
I’m telling you all of this as a round about way of explaining that while we enjoyed our weekend in Charleston with John’s family, it was still a weekend in Charleston with John’s family. And I hope I don’t get in trouble for saying that, although I suspect everyone who knows anything about it all would expect me to say exactly this kind of thing.
2.) My parents took Archie, Kit and Jack to Charlotte to spend the weekend with my brother, my sister-in-law, Camille, and my nephews Hayes and Rhys. If you click on that link you’ll see that my children enjoyed their weekend wholeheartedly. And because it was Hayes’s third birthday, Archie, Kit and Jack’s time with their cousins was extraordinarily special.
3.) When John and I got back to our hotel on Friday night after the rehearsal dinner, we rode the elevator up to the rooftop bar and holy cow was that place packed. We ordered a drink, found an open spot along the wrought-iron railing lining the roof’s perimeter, and enjoyed our stories-high view of downtown Charleston.
It didn’t take very long for John and I to agree that we felt old and out-of-place and entirely not cool enough to hang with the bar’s late-night crowd so we finished our drinks and called it a night. Before that happened, though, I had an opportunity to take a long, hard look at the Ravenel Bridge over the Cooper River, and from my spot on that roof I could finally see how damn steep the bridge’s incline really is. “I ran that mile in about eight minutes,” I reminded John, pointing to the steady climb on the Mt. Pleasant side of the bridge.
“That’s ’cause you rock,” my husband replied, and I’ll confess right now that it took a beat or two before any sort of self-depreciating thought crossed my mind.
4.) I think there’s something wrong with me because I still woke up at six o’clock Saturday morning even without my children there to coax me out of bed. I thought about walking down the hall to the coffee urns and plate of pastries I remembered the hotel staff sets up outside the elevator on each floor of the hotel, but decided against it when I realized I was still dressed in my pajamas.
So I turned on the television instead and discovered that TNT airs back-to-back episodes of Angel on Saturday mornings. You better believe I was all over that, and you ought to know, too, that when John woke up and saw what I was watching on television he rolled his eyes and moaned, “Oh, God. Don’t get obsessed with this again.”
5.) It took a little doing, but I convinced John to run with me Saturday morning. Before we left for Charleston he was all yeah-I’d-be-happy-to-run-with-you, but when it came right down to it John had a last minute freak-out and snipped at me for a while before I started to act like he had no choice and changed from my pajamas into my running clothes. That nearly backfired when I realized the bellhop had left my shoes, all wrapped up in a blue plastic BI-LO bag, in the back of our station wagon when he’d unloaded our car upon our arrival at the hotel.
6.) We did eventually get outside to run, John and I, and I promised John I’d run his pace, no matter what. So I did even if while doing so I longingly watched a pack of guys pass by us, headed in the opposite direction, running at what looked like my pace, and I managed to stay just a few steps in front of John even when another couple passed us on our left and I knew I could surpass them in no time at all if I could just take my foot of the breaks for a few blocks.
Once while we were running beside Battery Park I dropped back behind John, matching my stride to his cadence, and said, affecting my best brogue, “I don’t enjoy breathing like a pregnant walrus.” I was reciting a line from this commercial, and John knew it so he started to laugh which only made it more difficult for him to catch his breathe. That commercial is part of a joke John and I share so when I said it I knew what would come next.
7.) Later that morning I went to the bridal luncheon which was hosted at the home of a close friend of the bride’s family. The house was old but regal, situated at the end of an unpaved stretch of Coburg Road, lined on either side with live oaks. For a moment or two I wondered if Scarlet O’Hara would answer the door, but she didn’t, obviously, and before the luncheon was over I found myself seated to the right of a woman I didn’t know who was gossiping with the woman seated to her left. Maybe she didn’t see the place card marking my spot at the table, and maybe she didn’t care, but somehow she’d entwined my life with my sister-in-law’s, insisting that, “She adopted all those kids because, you know, she lost that Down’s baby…”
Um, no and not really, I thought about saying, but instead I lifted my chin way up high and smiled hugely at my sister-in-law seated across from me on the other side of the table. A few years ago I would have eaten that woman for dessert, but I’m happy to have finally learned who’s worth contradicting, and who is better off ignored.
8.) John and I spent the remainder of the afternoon visiting the shops along King Street. Before we went back to our room to get dressed for the seven o’clock wedding ceremony, John and I went to Magnolia’s on East Bay where we ordered appetizers and a drink, or two. We probably wouldn’t eat until late, John and I assumed, and if this wedding reception was like most Southern wedding receptions with seven hundred guests and appetizer-lined buffet tables we probably wouldn’t have much of an opportunity to eat anyway.
Our assumption was correct after all, but John and I wouldn’t know as much until after my husband squeezed my thigh, hard, during the wedding ceremony as the bride’s vows included the word obey, hot on the heels of at least two readings that asserted a husband’s dominance over his wife, and I breathed aloud, “Really?” Because, really?
9.) At the reception I ate two pieces of wedding cake, and danced to a big band with John whom I’m reminded each time we’re required to dance together learned a lot during his days in Cotillion and you have to believe me when I tell you that something about that always, always, always makes me laugh.
10.) My father answered my mother’s cell phone on Sunday morning when I called to check on Archie, Kit and Jack. My grandmother had died Saturday night, he explained.
When I talked to my mother Saturday morning she’d told me that Grandma had been transported from the nursing home to the hospital and that no one expected her to last much longer. John and I offered to come back early so Mom could catch a flight to Pennsylvania, but she asked us to leave when we got up on Sunday morning instead. I checked in with my mother a few times on Saturday, but her request remained the same.
Grandma turned ninety years old last week, but she didn’t look a day older than sixty at her funeral. They’d painted her face with make-up, and put her in a push-up bra, too, even though no one can remember Grandma wearing make-up or a any sort of supportive undergarments. Her daughters, my mother and her sisters, couldn’t believe how gorgeous Grandma looked. The priest called her stunning.
I bet she’s stunning now, too, wherever she is, wherever we go when we die. She was smart, and strong, and beautiful, and I will consider myself a fortunate woman if I am those three things myself when I’m ninety years old and leaving this place to find out what it is that comes next.
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Morning with the Moores

“Last night as I was taking apart your bouquet so I could place all the flowers in water, Kit insisted I allow her to set up her paper and crayons right there, right next to the vase on the counter, so that she could draw what she saw,” I wrote in Katie’s note.
















