“What is REAL?...It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real” – Margery Williams, The Velveteen Rabbit
BECCA and Floyd got married last weekend and it was hard for me to stay focused on photographing their wedding because tears kept welling up in my eyes. It started when the groomsmen arrived – eight tall young men looking particularly dapper in their dark suits and deep purple ties. These weren’t just any groomsmen — they were boys who practically grew up at my house, wrestling on the floor, eating their way through the pantry, creating all manner of fun and havoc from the time they were small until one by one, they finished college, got jobs and married.
It seems like only yesterday I was driving them to soccer practice and picking their band uniforms up off the floor… Did those messy, gangly little kids, turned awkward middle-schoolers, then active teenagers and busy college students really become this handsome group of successful young men? Yes, they did. And most of them married girls I had the fun of watching grow up, too.
I’ve had the privilege of photographing most of their weddings and even from behind my camera, I could see each couple has a special story, a unique love, a private understanding — a best friend to face the future with. Such high hopes and happy dreams accompany a couple to the altar and they stand there with such surety, holding hands, making promises and staring into each others’ eyes…The audacity with which people marry amazes me each and every time I go to or photograph a wedding and I mean audacity in a good way – the bold courage and daring way. I don’t remember what it felt like to be that sure of anything.
Becca and Floyd included some passages from The Velveteen Rabbit by Margery Williams in their ceremony and while I’ve heard the same passages read at other weddings, the poignancy of the message didn’t touch my heart the way it did as I listened to my son reading for his two friends. The story is about a velveteen rabbit that belongs to a little boy; over time, he becomes the boy’s favorite toy and constant companion. The boy gets scarlet fever and the doctor says all the toys in the nursery must be burned so they won’t re-infect the boy. Just before he is thrown into the fire, the velveteen rabbit sheds a real tear and because of “strange and wonderful nursery magic” becomes real, then hops away to live with the live rabbits in the boy’s yard.
The passages used at weddings come from a conversation between the rabbit and a wise old skin horse who also lives in the nursery — about being Real.
“Does it hurt?” the rabbit asks. “Sometimes,” the horse replies. “When you are Real you don’t mind being hurt.”
“Does it happen all at once…or bit by bit?” the rabbit asks. “It doesn’t happen all at once,” the horse replies. “You become. It takes a long time…Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off…and you get very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.”
Isn’t a good marriage so much like this? You start out all fresh and new, with life stretched ahead of you like a yellow brick road. Over time, the nicks and bumps along the way take their toll and you begin to lose some of your fur and become a little shabby; that’s when you find out if your love is real or not. Sometimes things don’t work out and couples split. But, for the ones who do make it, it’s the process of loving and sticking together through thick and thin that makes us Real.
Another verse that’s sometimes read at weddings perhaps explains the kinship found in a good marriage, as well as accounting for how a couple can so unabashedly walk down that aisle. It’s Emily Bronte’s, “Whatever souls are made of, his and mine are the same.”
Here’s to happily ever after for Becca and Floyd, and all their handsome groomsmen, and their lovely wives and partners and friends. It does take a long time to become Real, but when it happens it’s about the best thing you can imagine — just ask Mr. Clark and me. Thanks to each other, neither of us will ever look ugly again, except to people who don’t understand.
Lorin Sinn-Clark is a reporter for the Barrow Journal. She can be reached at lorin@barrowjournal.com.
