Before the wedding Geoffrey had told me that their intention behind the small wedding and the several days in Montecito was to give our two families a time to really get to know one another and that there would be time later, after their honeymoon in England, for the newlyweds to hold a big party for all their friends. What a wonderful sentiment, what a brilliant idea and how well executed! Thank you, Nica and Geoff, because meeting my consuegros Alicia and Peter was indeed a highlight of the summer and I hope we get together again soon! Alicia and Peter were in the throes of moving to a newly purchased home in Merida, Yucatan. The tales of bringing in all their belongings from Florida through the Mexican customs, the post midnight delivery of their furniture, the bureaucratic snafu because Peter wore shorts, all these stories had us laughing night after night.
We also met some of Alicia’s family, her half-sister Margi and husband Hector, her nieces Cammy and Erica, and Margi’s mother whose name (four letters long of which two were u’s) I can’t quite remember
Geoff and his girls! I love, love this picture!
The day after the wedding we took a tour bus about an hour’s drive north to visit three vineyards near Solvang. I think we were all somewhat done in by the previous day’s festivities. The first wine tasting was fun, the whites were crisp, the rose really good and I tried at least one of the reds. Monica had arranged to have delicious box lunches for us there and that was a lot of fun.
By the second vineyard we all seemed a bit drained and the vote was to skip the third and head back to our vacation paradise so we could relax and enjoy our last full day there.
Sunday morning was devoted to packing, cleaning up which meant following all the many rules listed for leaving the house in tip-top shape–filling the five dishwashers, doing laundry, carrying out the bags of trash, putting away all the pool and lawn equipment, etc, etc– as we had to be out by 10 o’clock that morning. There was a little time for a few last-minute activities. Those who hadn’t tried the trampoline did so now. And there were a few wistful moments by the pool.
We arrived in LA in time for a brunch of Cuban pastries, sweet and savory, from Portos, a bakery which does for LA what Juniors does for Brooklyn, fried plantains, fresh fruit and good strong coffee at Margi and Hector’s home. Hector owns three restaurants in Hollywood; needless to say, the plantains were the best I’ve ever eaten! The temperature was a mere 104…but dry!
Back in Carlsbad, however, I finally got to elaborate on my tenuous connection with Alicia and her family, the Manduleys, which I had mentioned a couple of times during the week. Alicia was born in Holguin, Cuba, in the Oriente province near Camaguey and my great uncle “Charlie”…Charles Muecke…had lived in Holguin back during the Spanish-American War and then again later until his death in the late ’40s. For many years I was in possession of the book he had written late in the 1920s called Patria y Libertad. I had sent the book to Geoffrey as soon as I felt that he and Monica were a real couple in the hopes that perhaps she would translate more of it than my mother had.
When I showed the book to Alicia and Peter they were really excited and Peter immediately became immersed in it . I knew that Uncle Charlie had been sent to a military school on Long Island at the time his sisters (my grandmother and great aunt) were sent to boarding school in Lausanne, Switzerland, when the family was moving from Germany to NYC. I knew also that Uncle Charlie was a munitions expert, knew about blowing up bridges, had been granted some land in Mexico by Pancho Villa and was generally considered the black sheep of the family. I knew that his wife had moved back to New Jersey (she was from one of the Patterson silk families) after a bullet had ricocheted through their casa in Holguin one night. Of course, he is the family member I am most interested in! How could one not be?
Now I learned that he truly had fought with the Cubans, not with the Americans, and that his book was a long refutation of all the biased press coverage in the US newspapers, which dismissed the Cuban forces as basically irrelevant, and a detailed journal of his life at the turn of the century. And according to an article about him in the online magazine CubaNow, there is still a neighborhood in Camaguey called La Mosca which was the name of his farm! (If you have gotten to this blog through Facebook you will find the link there.)
So this brings us pretty much to the end of the wedding and all its ramifications. A walk through the San Diego Botanical Gardens (formerly Quail Garden), a bit of window shopping in Encinitas, a great last dinner at a wine bar and restaurant that makes its own wines (muchas gracias, Alicia y Peter) and the next morning we all headed our separate ways….for now.
All these photos were in the Botanical Garden.