Daughter will be beautiful

Shades of gray I had heard of.
But shades of white?
Saturday saw us on an excursion to Fort Wayne to pick up daughter Sally’s wedding dress. She and her fiancé, Ben, are getting married later this month.
And while I’ve been in my share of dress shops over the span of my 65 years, this was my first ever visit to a store that specializes in bridal gowns.
It was not unlike a visit to another planet.
For starters, the planet is populated almost entirely by women. All the staff members are female. The only other guy I saw was a prospective groom, who was nodding dutifully as he followed the prospective bride around the shop.
And then there is the language being spoken. It’s in English, I suppose. But the vocabulary is so alien that I was immediately lost. It may as well have been Urdu.
The store’s landscape was dominated by row upon row of rack upon rack of gowns, all of them beautiful and all of them costly.
The variety was daunting. There were dresses in any length, any degree of formality, and any style you might imagine.
And color?
To a guy, they were white. But to brides and mothers of the bride, there were countless different shades to choose from: Ivory, ecru, off-white, bright white, snow white and every step in between.
While we waited for Sally’s dress to be located from the back of the shop, where it had been altered after a fitting, I couldn’t help but watch as a bride, her mother and a friend debated a fitting that was underway. The alterations specialist was working miracles.
When I first glanced over, I thought the bride looked lovely in her gown. Any guy who had been shopping would have said, “Wrap it up. I’ll take it.”
But when I glanced back the alterations person had strategically pinched at the fabric in a couple of places, changing the gown entirely. Now it wasn’t just lovely; it was spectacular. The bride didn’t just look pretty; she looked glamorous. Clearly there was some magic going on that guys just do not understand.
Finally, Sally’s dress was brought out from the back, though it was hard to get a look at it at first. A plastic bag like you get from the dry cleaners covered it. Except that this plastic bag was bright pink and more than eight feet long.
And it came with traveling instructions: The gown was to lie flat in transit, then promptly hung up when we arrived home.
With the seats folded down in the back of my wife’s Honda CRV, it stretched from the passenger’s seat to the back door, looking like some pink ghost.
That’s how it will have to travel to Bloomington in a few weeks for the wedding, and everything else in the car will just have to be rearranged to make that possible.
Even with all that, I really didn’t get much of a look at the dress.
That will have to wait a few weeks to the moment when our youngest daughter walks down the aisle. I’m sure of one thing: She’ll be the most beautiful girl on earth that day.[[In-content Ad]]