Getting The Picture

My 85-year-old neighbor Joel Langert is one of my favorite people, a curmudgeon's curmudgeon with a soft spot he guards fiercely. One minute he's grumbling about how movies used to be two for a nickel, and the next he's leaving a beautiful orchid -- a phalaenopsis or perhaps a paphiopedilum, a lady-slipper, grown lovingly in his backyard greenhouse -- on my kitchen counter. He just walks in, puts down the flower and berates me later for leaving the front door of my house unlocked. Without asking, he once planted a fig tree on my front lawn, a tree that now yields succulent fruit by the hundreds and a tree that I adore. And he'll often ask me to buy him packs -- he doesn't drive anymore -- of his favorite Dutch cigarillos, Schimmelpenninck, even though he knows he shouldn't be smoking them. When I took him to his first Nationals game, Joel didn't stop complaining about the noise -- the constant stream of musical snippets aimed at inciting the crowd -- for the first eight innings (we didn't make it to the ninth). I asked him when was the last time he was at a baseball game, and he replied, "Lou Gehrig was playing at Yankee Stadium."

Joel and his wife, Eileen, had been married for 55 years, 11 longer than I've been alive, and enjoyed a beautiful relationship. "It was love at first sight," he remembered of their meeting at the Gertz department store on Long Island where they both worked. "I wrote up a petition that she should marry me, and I took it to everyone in the store to sign." After their wedding in New York, on January 29, 1950 -- "I remember the church was candlelit" -- the newlyweds drove with another couple down to Fort Lauderdale. Joel laughed as he recalled the two songs that played on the car radio nonstop that trip: "Ghost Riders in the Sky," a cowboy's lament, and "Sixteen Tons," a depressing number about the perils of coal mining. Not exactly the most romantic driving music. (I laughed, of course, because Gloria Gaynor was only 4 months old at the time, and it could have been much worse.)

But it was a fitting start, as driving and travel would play a huge part in their lives, on trips over the years from Finland to Singapore, and in cars such as their 1956 pink T-Bird, the 1957 Jaguar Mark VII Saloon ("It looked like a Bentley," Joel says), the 1972 E-Type Jaguar ("Eileen was never into the shifting thing") and, finally, the S-Type he bought Eileen for Christmas in 2002, parked in the driveway with a big red bow tied to the front.

After decades in advertising with the Hecht Co., Joel now spends much of his retirement tending to his beloved plants. Eileen, on the other hand, was always abuzz with activity, always off, it seemed, on one of the many trips for senior citizens she organized and chaperoned for Arlington County. When a mutual neighbor on our block gave birth to triplets, several of us chipped in for a night nurse for a couple of evenings. We felt rather proud of our gift, not realizing that, for months and months, Eileen was baking the family fully prepared dinners with no fanfare.

Despite Joel's faux crankiness, his most endearing trait, it was easy to see how much he loved Eileen, and how proud he was of her. I asked him recently what made his love for Eileen so special, and without even a second to ponder, he replied, "She was two-thirds of me." Two-thirds of me. I tried to soak that one up. "We never once said no to each other," and then, reverting back to prime Joel form, "except the time I wanted to pull up the grass and replace it with those small paving pebbles."

So now, as I stood in the darkness, the band's music coming through the windows in that muffled way, where you only hear the bass, I knew I had to act quickly. I collected my cameras, two Canon EOS1 Mark IIs, my bag filled with lenses and my very sweaty suit coat, and headed for the parking lot. I would have left in half an hour anyway, and I had already taken more than 1,500 images that day, starting with the "getting ready," as it's referred to in wedding speak -- the ceremony, the family pictures, the dancing, the cake-cutting. I tucked my little pouch filled with identical, neatly stacked 2-gigabyte memory cards -- memory cards, how apt, I always think -- into the bag and headed back to Arlington.

MY OWN BEST MAN DIDN'T SHOW UP FOR MY WEDDING.

Nine years ago, my younger brother, Eric, was directing his best friend and unknown actress, Edie Falco, in a tiny independent film he wrote specifically for her. Filming was scheduled for the day of my wedding, and Eric bowed out. I was devastated, having shared a room with him for 16 years while growing up on Long

Island. My older brother Daniel, an esteemed critic and classics scholar, came to the rescue, with a lengthy toast about the differences between ancient Greek -- my wife, Maya, is Greek -- and ancient Jewish traditions. Given that I had rarely been inside a synagogue, except for weddings, since I was 13 and am decidedly non-religious, the toast struck me as wonderfully intellectual and, not surprisingly, impersonal.

Eric went on to win best director at Sundance the next year, and Edie went on to become the most famous mob wife in television history as Carmela Soprano, and all was long forgotten years ago. Truth be told, we don't really discuss it very much, and that seems to work pretty well. We all serve some kind of penance, and maybe mine is having to listen to touching best man speeches every week of my life. Ironically, it would be Daniel, with whom I was never close growing up -- he, spending much of our childhood reading about pharaohs and Greek gods; me, worrying how the Mets could possibly survive without Tom Seaver -- with whom I would, years later, travel all over the world, tracking down Holocaust survivors for a memoir he was writing. The emptiness that I felt during his stand-in toast -- I kept hoping for some funny little anecdote about me, until I realized that my own brother didn't know me well enough to have any funny little anecdotes -- would be replaced by the camaraderie of many, many long trips together, from Australia to Ukraine, just me and Daniel on very long plane rides.

This is why we all love weddings so much -- decades of family history rushing to the surface, like a submarine after nine months under the ocean. Of course, it's usually just minutes after that spectacular arrival that you want to run for cover yelling, "Dive! Dive! Dive!" A tug of war between a bride and her mom over something as simple as where to place the headpiece can get to Defcon 1 remarkably quickly, as this exchange I recall hearing at a Georgetown church illustrates:

"Mom, it should go here."