Awake at 6:45 a.m., I snuggle into my husband’s back, wrapping my arm around him and pressing my cheek to his tee shirt. The room is already filling with light. I’d like to sleep longer, but I can’t return to my dream. I can’t even remember it. At 7:30 I rise, put on my leopard-print, flannel pajama bottoms, an awful match with my blue tee shirt, and try to suppress thoughts about growing older. I feel guilty to be thinking of myself. My daughter Tamarind's wedding day has begun.

Lying on the sofa, drinking coffee from my mug with the hairline crack but knowing I shouldn't dawdle, I read in The New York Times that late afternoon sun cast dancing colors through an enormous stained-glass window as Alicia Hill walked up the aisle to the pounding of African drums, an almost imperceptible sashay in her stride.  On to Money & Business. According to Alteon, a publicly traded pharmaceutical company in Ramsey, New Jersey, as people age, glucose links proteins in the body’s tissues, making the tissues stiffer, like cooked meat. Alteon’s drug to break up these “advanced glycation end products” did not reduce high blood pressure significantly, and its stock plunged from about $7 to $2.05 a share. I put my hands to my cheeks and press hard enough to confirm that the meat still feels raw.

From a bag of discards, I retrieve one of the tchotchkes my husband would like me to part with: the Madame Butterfly doll that Melvin Blair, a.k.a. “Lucky,” gave my daughter Liana when she was five years old. I place her on the round glass coffee table. Her orange kimono with blue butterflies and cream-colored flowers is faded, her parasol missing. She wears three flowers—turquoise, yellow, and orange—in her dusty black hair. Lucky was a sailor on the Enterprise and served in Vietnam. He had a receding hairline and a cleft in his chin and wanted to marry me, but I didn’t even want to kiss him, though I liked to go to movies with him and kvetch about my troubles with other men. I'm not sure why I've kept the doll. A memento of my daughter's childhood? A reminder of opportunities I passed on?

I’m running late now and must get ready immediately. After showering, I put on the lavender shoes I wore when I married my third husband in 2002. They were the “something old.” I'd bought them several years earlier for Liana’s wedding. They were white then, and I wore them with a peach-colored dress embroidered with white flowers. I had them dyed to match my lavender wedding dress.  I guess these are my official wedding shoes, because I’m wearing them today to Tamarind’s wedding with a lavender silk skirt and blue silk Chinese blouse.

It’s late September, about 85 degrees at noon at Morcom Rose Garden in Oakland, California, the sky unblemished. The petals of the last pink and white roses are getting ready to fall. Most of the guests are already here, and I’m anxious because I don’t see my husband, Richard, who came separately because I had to leave early to pick up the coffee. I’m afraid he’ll be late, but then I see him in his gray pants and blue polo shirt, hazel eyes shining in the light, forehead beaded with perspiration, and I can worry about Tamarind’s future life instead.

She was a happy, playful child with a quick intelligence, brown eyes and wild brown curls like her father's.  When she was three years old she told me she could touch the ceiling.  "With a ladder?" I asked.  "I bet I can touch the ceiling without a ladder," she said.  "Okay, it's a bet."  She ran into the bedroom and came back with my hand mirror, which she placed face up on the dining room table.  Putting her hand on the mirror, she said, "I win!"

I explained to her early that she grew inside me, but that it takes both a mommy and a daddy to make a baby.  People often told her that she got her curly hair from her father.  She put all this information together when she four.  "I know why mommies don't marry mommies and daddies don't marry daddies," she told me as we walked down the hill on our way home from Pooh Corner. "Why?" I asked.  "Because if mommies married mommies, you'd get a bald baby, and if daddies married daddies, you'd just get hair!"

When she was in second grade, she went on a tour of the Oakland Museum with her school class. The docent showed the children an antique printing press and explained how it worked. Tamarind raised her hand before the docent could finish, said, "It couldn't work that way," and proceeded to show the docent where the paper went in and came out, which way the crank turned, etc. The docent realized immediately that Tamarind was right and told the teacher she'd given this talk to thousands of children and adults, but no one had ever before figured out how the printing press really worked. Whenever I told this story as evidence of Tamarind's brilliance, she said, "It's not such a big deal. That printing press was a very simple machine." She was so good at mechanical things I thought maybe she'd become an engineer. Instead, she studied art, then earned a degree in biology and environmental studies.

* * *

My father, 85 years old, moves his chair out of the sun. I should have done this for him. His medication for myasthenia gravis makes him sensitive to sunlight. The disease weakens his muscles, so his cheeks are slack and hollow now, and he walks with a stoop.

Tamarind, in a calf-length flowing white dress and red shoes, walks slowly toward the huppah—the wedding canopy. Her long brown hair, wavy now, is held back with barrettes; her smile is wide and radiant. By the time I was her age, I had two children and had been married three times, twice to the same man. Richard tells me I’m always in too much of a rush. He’s a procrastinator, married just once, to me, at age 60. In general, by averaging our inclinations, we get things done at about the right time.

The groom is tall, his own long brown hair pulled back in an Oriental-style knot.  His work is in construction, his joy in kung fu. This is my first Jewish Pagan wedding, and I’m looking forward to the experience. The Wiccan priestess asks me to read the first blessing, which Tamarind gave me yesterday. I’m not sure if I should face the audience or Tamarind and Phillip. Standing in front of the huppah, facing the guests, I say, “Land, air, water and all living creatures and plants provide sustenance for your bodies and spirit.” Turning toward the bride and groom, I continue:  “May your appreciation of nature never cease.” I want to savor the wedding, to have it go on and on, but it’s over with quickly—vows and rings exchanged, blessings read, wine glass emptied. Phillip breaks a glass with his foot and we all yell “Mazel tov” into the sparkling air.

My backyard is filled with umbrella tables. The caterer has put out the appetizers: asparagus wrapped with prosciutto, figs stuffed with walnuts and bleu cheese, cucumber cups filled with crab. This is no kosher feast, but a klezmer band plays.

My friend Eileen from elementary school wears a black dress with red flowers. Neither of her sons is married yet. She is talking to Sara, whom I met when her son went to preschool with Tamarind. He died several years ago of a heroin overdose. Marcia, whom I met at the Berkeley Poets’ Co-op in 1973, has a son, but he’s only 14. Phillip’s hippie mother, Kathy, is here from New Mexico. She wears sandals, a multicolored scarf around her head, an assortment of beads. Among the women my age and older, I’m the only grandmother: Liana’s son Brandon, who seems to be enjoying the party, is almost five months.

People say “Congratulations!” and “Tamarind is a beautiful bride.” Kathy says, “Thank you for a daughter.” Sara says, “Tamarind looks timeless. She could be a bride in the 1920s or 40s, or even ancient Greece.”

Tamarind has hand-decorated the edges of the plates on which we heap salad, grilled vegetables and meat, rice, and various curries. Some have flowers, others geometric designs, and some have “pearls of wisdom” that the guests wrote on their RSVP cards—for example, “I am my beloved’s and my beloved is mine.” When the band takes a break, I announce over the microphone that the plates are keepsakes for the guests to take home.

Tamarind and Phillip feed each other a piece of the second layer of the four-tiered cake decorated with autumn leaves and flowers. They are very polite, not smashing the cake into each other’s face as some couples do. Richard and I were sweet about this, too. Ours was a round sheet cake decorated with stars and moons and planets: chocolate and raspberry, with beige frosting. It looks like the different layers of Tamarind and Phillip’s cake have different flavors. When chocolate pieces start appearing, I squeeze into line.

My father sits at the table as pieces of cake pass above him. I’m glad that he’s here. Most of the adults I knew as a child are dead now: my mother, my uncles, my grandparents, the Zenners, the Meisners, Mr. and Mrs. Mickens, Pete and Emma Christensen, Hope, Betty, and Bobbie Sink. This is the short list: in truth, it goes on and on. Even some of the children are gone now: my friend Diane had breast cancer; Karen Mickens was stabbed to death in Santa Cruz when she was 22.

Someone has taken down the table on the backyard deck to make room for dancing.  I’m thinking about Cambridge Way, the street where I grew up in Piedmont, California, not far away.  I'd give just about anything to run down Cambridge Way one more time in late afternoon in the rich light of summer, my mother calling from the front porch, “Slow down, or you’ll fall and break your neck!” Tamarind, Phillip, Liana, her husband Chase, Eileen, her husband Chuck, Tamarind’s father Ted (my second husband), Ted’s third wife Maureen, and I form a circle. I see my mother, beckoning me with a plate of chocolate chip cookies, warm from the oven, as Mr. Mickens mows his lawn, Walt Meisner chats with Frank Zenner under the birch tree, and Bobbie Sink comes home in her nurse’s uniform. Holding hands, we run and skip to the right, then to the left, then to the center, over and over. Tamarind is still smiling; I hope she’ll be mostly happy. The Mickens’ black dog, another Lucky, chases a car down Cambridge Way, running faster and faster. I run faster and faster, too, in my wedding shoes, as the music speeds up like time and the universe itself, as night comes on.