I have attended my first destination wedding – everything and more I hoped it would be. Make that one more thing I can cross off my bucket list.
Note to self: Make bucket list soon. It’s just not much fun accomplishing things that aren’t even on the list only because the list hasn’t been made. Note on note: Maybe I should make making a list the first thing on the list.
Now it’s true, I don’t get out much or go too far when I do. When I was a younger woman, it seems like every time I wandered, I ended up wishing I were back home in Texas. The last time I made it back, I decided it would be easier to stay where I was, read about exotic places and ask my friends about their adventures. And, as things usually do, it’s all worked out.
The exceptional component about this destination wedding was it wasn’t but about 35 miles from my apartment in San Angelo, at St. Boniface Catholic Church in Olfen.
Ah, ah, ah. I heard that guffaw. Well it was a destination wedding. It certainly was. Carol Bell, the bride, grew up on a cattle ranch near Brownwood. She is an attorney in Chicago. Her groom, it’s pointed out on the couple’s wedding website, hails from Illinois but has the saving grace of loving good barbecue and country/western music.
Admittedly, I didn’t make the first-run guest list, I can only assume because I don’t think the bride and I had ever met. Carol was grown and gone from Brownwood when I moved there in 2002. A mutual friend’s invitation was addressed to the friend and her guest.“You know Brownwood people,” my friend Helen Crews remarked after her first-choice guest had to cancel. “Would you like to go?”
“Why yes,” I said. “Why yes I certainly would.”
Carol’s mother Betty was one of the first ladies I met after I moved to Brownwood. Betty, a CPA by profession, is a gracious soul and, in addition to her practice served as an accountant for several non-profit organizations in Brownwood. Our paths crossed frequently until Betty’s health began to fail and the family brought her to San Angelo for long-term care.
Carol’s father, Bill, was a longtime attorney in Brown County. If you want to talk Texas pedigree, Bill’s great grandfather was a Brown County sheriff in the 1870s, and was shot and killed by the town drunk who wasn’t ready to give it up for the night and go home.
Now in my younger days of wandering, I lived in Illinois and I understood Carol’s plight completely. Texans can live somewhere else and like it, but their true allegiance will be to the Lone Star State. The pressure can be tremendous though. Texans have a reputation to uphold. It’s difficult to contain the largesse and be gracious and proud of our Texas heritage, and, at the same time, prevent those poor souls not from Texas from feeling too badly about having to be from somewhere else.
Well, Carol and Rob did a remarkable job of living up to the wild stereotypical Texas expectations of the Chicago and points-beyond guests. None of them had ever been to a wedding rehearsal dinner where there were two longhorn cows on exhibit. Of course neither had I. For the guests who were in the area for several days, the wedding website included a list of interesting sights and side trips for the site-seers – a winery in Christoval, unique downtown shops, an art museum, a frontier fort. Not too shabby a list to us show off as a supreme destination.
The wedding was lovely, the bride beautiful, the couple’s vows were tender and true. The reception following at the Cactus Hotel in San Angelo was a grand party. No one could have asked for anything more or would have expected anything less.
Before the ceremony, seated there with my friends “catching up” as the afternoon sun streamed through the stained glass windows of the historic St. Boniface cathedral, I smiled that anyone would be surprised this not even a dot-on-the-map place would have become a wedding destination. I wondered if we needed to tell more people about it or work harder at keeping it a secret.
It’s a question without an answer. But let me just say, I was glad to be there. In my limited experience with destination weddings, I thought this one was perfectly wonderful.
EDITOR’S NOTE: Candace Cooksey Fulton, formerly of Brownwood, is a freelance writer living in San Angelo, Texas. She may be reached at ccfulton2002@yahoo.com. The original version of this column was published in the San Angelo Standard-Times, June 13, 2013, and www.mitdil1.dream.press has exclusive permission to publish this edited version.
