A friend of mine sent me an email a few months back.  In it was a description of an idea to connect photographers with children who have chronic illnesses in order to tell the children's stories via photographs.

The idea was thought up by Katie Lemieux, in conjunction with Gilda's Club of South Florida.

I have a close friend who was diagnosed with breast cancer at just 24.  When she called me to tell me that she had cancer, I was having the time of my life, snowboarding in Breckenridge on its opening weekend in 2008.  I remember how quickly what had seemed so enormous lost its mystique as I wondered if she was going to be okay and what I was supposed to do or say when a friend you've had for 15 years drops a bomb on you while you are 2000 miles from home.

The next year was filled with surgeries, chemo parties and a whole lot of hanging out, seeing as my friend wasn't able to work and suddenly had a lot of time on her hands.

I remember her telling me how she used to go to Gilda's Club for activities that were provided for people suffering from cancer and how it really helped her to connect with others facing the same challenges.  So when I got this email about a project being spearheaded with Gilda's Club, it seemed like one of those fate-filled events that I was just supposed to be a part of.

Finally stepping foot into the beautiful, peacock-laden property of Gilda's Club, I was linked with a young woman named Deana, who, a month after graduating from high school, starting seeing strange bruising on her body and experiencing dizziness.  After a visit to the emergency room, she was diagnosed with leukemia.  After having to undergo chemotherapy over the span of a few years, Deana lost all her hair.  Twice.

As someone who is in a chronic state of 'hair crises' and feels the need to make radical hair changes on a weekly basis, I can't imagine what it must be like to be 20 years old and to have not only had to face a mortality most of us choose to ignore, but also to lose a part of us that seems to be the external symbol of our femininity.  Deana told stories of how she was so weak from the treatments that she was unable to walk up and down the stairway in her house and became confined to one area in which she could maneuver. 

When asked how she feels now, she smiles a big, beautiful, I'm-20-years-old-and-I-know-how-good-it-is-to-be-alive smile and tells me she feels great, has recovered all her energy and, very importantly, she has hair again.

Beautiful, shiny, thick, black, Pantene Pro-V commercials hair.

You know what's funny?  You see people walking around day after day and you can never really know the story of the person standing in line in front of you at Publix.

If I had seen Deana one day, I never would have thought that this vivacious 20 year old has suffered through more trials than anyone should in a lifetime.

And I guess that's an important lesson in itself.  We're all struggling with different battles and a little compassion goes a long way.

There's something infectious about the smile of a person who knows what it's like to suffer and survive.

This was by far the quickest turnaround on engagement photos: we took these on a Wednesday and the wedding was on Saturday.  Ernie and Jessie wanted some photos with a red-theme to them so that they could use them as enlargements to place around the reception.  We walked around Coconut Grove searching for spots that would match the specs, and after a short walk, we found the red wall that was perfect for them:

I love these guys.  This was the first time I had met Ernie, and he was really fun to be around.  They are the kind of couple that you know will make an amazing family.

I think that it can be easy to lose sight of what a wedding really symbolizes and what happens on the other side of your first day as husband and wife. 

The other day, I was reading a magazine and I read an article that helped me to realize that a wedding is the beginning of a great story and a legacy that will touch neighbors and friends, and create children who will one day repeat the cycle. 

If you have some time and would like a little tear-jerker to remind you of what are the truly important things in life, please read on.

[Disclaimer: it's a long article and you probably will cry]

Getting The Picture
By Matt Mendelsohn

IT WAS 10:15 P.M., AND THE BAND WAS HALFWAY THROUGH GLORIA GAYNOR'S "I WILL SURVIVE," a song I've heard so many hundreds of times in the past nine years that I think I should start earning some sort of secret ASCAP royalty, when the tiny phone in my pocket began to vibrate.

My cellphone, like any good wedding photographer will tell you, is always on vibrate, even when I'm not at a wedding. Just one of those silly things, really, but I don't take any chances. I never trust traffic on the Beltway, even on a weekend. I don't eat strange foods on Friday, lest I become sick on Saturday. And I absolutely cringe at the thought of my phone going off during a wedding.

I cringe because it's my job as the photographer to document the nuptial events unfolding in front of me -- from the hushed nave of St. Matthew's Cathedral downtown to the Potomac overlook at George Washington's River Farm -- not become part of them. I'm hired, of course, to chronicle, but after nine years and some 400 weddings -- think Bill Murray in "Groundhog Day," but with a lot more salmon -- one can't help just plain observing. And so, here is observation Number One: On average these days, one and a half guests will receive a phone call during a wedding, often smack during the vows, the inevitable tinny strains of Beethoven's Ninth emanating, just as I'm sure Beethoven himself would have wanted, from the circuit board of a Motorola RAZR.

One and a half guests. Welcome to my world. This is what I've become after all these years, a deranged comic book character: mild-mannered wedding photographer by night, captive observer of the human condition by day. Who could pretend not to notice, after all, when a mother's very first words upon seeing her daughter in a wedding dress are: "Your earring is crooked." And who could look the other way when a priest tosses the couple he's married only three minutes earlier out of a warm and dry church and into the pouring rain because he has a confessional schedule to maintain? (Though not Christian myself, I've heard Paul's letter to the Corinthians about charity -- the one with the noisy gongs and clanging cymbals -- enough to appreciate the rich irony.) Or when an orthopedic surgeon, minutes away from his own marriage, takes time to treat the leg of one of the waitstaff who, while setting up tables, has slipped on a wet floor and happens to speak not a word of English.

I witness acts of incredible tenderness -- a bride quietly pinning a photo of her mother who died of breast cancer into her dress; acts of incredible joy -- just about any father dancing with his daughter; and acts of questionable sanity -- a group of adult groomsmen allowing an 8-year-old to pilot a golf cart into a lake comes to mind. And each Sunday morning around 2 o'clock, as I collapse into bed after another wedding, I'm convinced that I must be part of some kind of clinical trial, with no end date in sight.

And so, on this particular June night, it wasn't until a few more songs had whizzed by -- I can't be sure if it was "Mustang Sally," "Shout" and then "Love Shack" or, more likely, "Love Shack," "Shout" and, finally, "Mustang Sally" -- that I had a chance to look at the flashing display on my phone, a strange number with a strange area code. I put down my cameras, walked outside to the patio of Vienna's Meadowlark Botanical Gardens and dialed in the dark.

"Hi, this is Matt Mendelsohn. Did someone call this number?"

"Matt, it's Missy Langert, your neighbor Joel's daughter, calling from Dallas. Mom's had a massive heart attack while attending a wedding here, and Dad is home all alone. He didn't come out for the wedding. Is there any way you can go over and sit with him? He's all by himself."

Taken by surprise, I tried to process all of this information in a room filled with happy people having a wonderful time. She was at a wedding in Texas.  I was at a wedding in Virginia.  And Joel was all by himself.

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, 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.

At first I was afraid I was petrified/

Kept thinkin' I could never live without

you by my side.

As I sat across from Joel on that June night, I realized the song I had come to hate so much, the song that, perhaps more than any other, constantly reminds me that I have become a wedding photographer, shooting the same thing week in and week out, was now racing through my groggy brain. This time, though, it was reminding me of why I am a wedding photographer. My years of downplaying what I did for a living seemed silly as I sat on Joel's sofa. How bad could it be to be around people who are desperately in love, all the while surrounded by friends and family who love them desperately. Yeah, big deal, they all go crazy when "I Will Survive" or "YMCA" starts playing, but they haven't heard those songs thousands of times; I have. And when I think that I could be tallying billable hours, or working in a cubicle in E Ring, or selling widgets, I think my life is pretty darn okay.

Just the other day, I received an e-mail from a photographer looking for an internship. His short note almost brought me to tears: "I come from Sarajevo, Bosnia, and my life has put me though many challenges. I am saying this because I have had the chance to see the worst in humans and was lucky enough to survive it. Since then, I have made it my goal to help people record their happiest moments, because those moments are rare and precious, and one never has too many of them."

I kept Joel company for hours, long into the next morning, information coming in very slowly, and me, still in my sweaty wedding clothes, nodding off occasionally. Around 4:30 a.m., the phone rang, and I could hear the voice through the receiver telling my neighbor and friend that the woman he had been married to for 55 years didn't make it.

I felt so out of place, so not the person who should have been there at that terrible moment. But looking back, two years later, it almost seems as if Eileen was just being her usual giving self, not just allowing me to see how much she was adored, but allowing me to see marriage in its barest and most naked form. For nine hours that day I had watched a marriage begin, and, now, for nine hours, I would watch one end. I wanted to turn away as Joel shook uncontrollably. I tried so hard to soothe him, but I knew there was nothing I could really say. Though I was in the presence of profound loss, all I could feel was love. This wasn't about linens and party favors, or caviar stations and big bands. There were no toasts and no blessings, no Bible readings, no clanging gongs or blaring trumpets. At long last, I was seeing the embodiment of marriage itself, the very reason man and woman have been wed from the beginning of time. True love.

Something else floated through my brain, this time decidedly more literary than Gloria Gaynor. In my days as an English major, some 20 years ago, the book that had the most profound effect on me was Thomas Wolfe's Look Homeward, Angel , a tattered paperback edition of which is never far from my grasp. Now I could hear my favorite line, the book's second sentence, coming through: "Each of us is all the sums he has not counted. Subtract us into nakedness and night again, and you shall see begin in Crete four thousand years ago the love that ended yesterday in Texas."

It was 8 a.m. when the little cellphone in my pocket began to vibrate. My wife was calling, and I told her the news. I gave Joel a hug, grabbed my jacket and my cameras, and walked across the street and into my house, where, unable to sleep, I went downstairs and began to download, with newfound respect, memory cards from the previous night's wedding.

The Knot Best of Weddings 2012 provides a "by brides, for brides" guide to the top wedding professionals across the country. Through these ratings, engaged couples find detailed feedback on local wedding businesses reviewed by thousands of newlyweds who had great things to say.

Hello!

Has anyone out there visited The Spanish Monastery in North Miami Beach?  It was built in Segovia, Spain from 1133-1144 and was taken down stone by stone in the mid 1830s during a time of revolution.  The stones were moved from Spain to the United States, then moved around a few times before finally making it to the current location in 1964.  How's that for cool? 

Want to see what 900 year old stones look like?  Want to see what Michael and Eliza look like?