Dave Foulk Internet Flyer

My youngest daughter, Julia “Julie” is getting married this weekend.  Julie, who has always taken life at ninety miles-an-hour will marry a soft spoken Eagle Scout, and fellow ETSU student, Adam Wilson. 

The service will be at an Episcopal Church, so that means I will have to be on my best behavior in what some call a “high Church”. I think that means they would likely not need my services as an electric bass player…ever.

I’m worried that if I kneel just one too many times, the leg I smashed by running over myself will say “enough”, and it’ll take a platoon of deacons, elders, or whatever kind of help they can muster to get me back in the pew.

To my eternal gratitude I will not have to wear a cumberbund, or as it is known in fat guy circles, a satin truck tire retread.  Once, when I was performing a narration at First Baptist Church in Jonesboro, Georgia, my cumberbund fastener failed, and the garment flew through the air, striking a member of the casserole committee right between the eyes. 

There’s been more preparation for this wedding I am sure…than the first five Mercury Space Shots combined.  And NASA probably had fewer people working on them, too.  But it is all worth it.  My little girl, the last of the Foulk’s is marrying. 

Like magnets, opposites in love sometimes attract.  And they make a wonderful couple, even though there is a height differential of around two-and-a-half feet.

Nobody will ever know if her daddy cried at her wedding.  Because of a horrible head cold I caught from any number of suspects. Now I appear to be in a continual state of uncontrolled weeping and sniffing. Because of that, I’ll be the only one who will know for sure.  If I were a betting man, I would say I won’t.  I tend to do those sort of things late at night when nobody but God is watching.

But if this cold doesn’t improve, when the pastor asks “Who giveth this woman..” I will snort and and say “Her muddah and I..snarrrk”, and attendees will think “poor guy, he’s taking it hard.”

But I’ll certainly have ample opportunity to reflect and review during those all-too-quick moments when the “I do’s”, the prayers, and the music play out into the grand fortissimo of the recessional.

I’ll wonder if I did everything I could have to ensure -all- of my children learned what they could from my mistakes and my triumphs.

Was I quiet at the right time, and outspoken when needed?  And was I there enough for Julie?  She was the youngest and had to live her formative years through some of the toughest financial and career times I’ve known.  The attitude and ability to “work things out”  because of it has served her well as a young adult.

It’s really too late for all of that sort of ruminating.  Now it’s a matter of showing up on time, making sure my tuxedo fits, paying the proper people, loading the right stuff to bring to the Church, all of those mundane things you get to do instead of sit down and have a nice talk with the woman who is about to forever change her name. 

So hope we had enough of those talks through the twenty-something years up to this time.

Julia Wilson.  Has a nice ring to it, eh?

But no matter what her name is, she will always be daddy’s little girl.

Always.

I love you, Julie.