On this day 24 years ago, my little brother got married. I packed my loose bottom tart tins in with my t-shirts, and called the pediatrician to make sure that my 10-week-old baby, John, was OK to fly on a plane (they said yes, just try nursing him at take off and especially landing to equalize the pressure in his little ears) and we headed for Santa Fe.
I made a tiered tart for the wedding cake. We shopped at Albertsons for pie ingredients almost as soon as we got there, and I got to bake the tarts in the kitchen of the Santa Fe style estate where the wedding was to be held. My sister-in-law, Jen, was the personal assistant – amanuensis – to the woman who owned the place, who I think was the widow of a former cabinet minister. Anyways, it was a series of adobe buildings, strung together around a central courtyard – plaza, I guess. There was even a pool. We got there a day early, so that I could bake the tarts. It was fun for me, because my mom, John’s dad, and my brother were all there to entertain John while I baked.
The tarts in the tiers were French apple, on the bottom, blueberry with a lemon streusel next, linzer tart, and a tiny lemon meringue on top. There were extras of all of them except the lemon, so there’d be enough to feed everyone at the wedding.
My brother’s baseball team played a game on the morning of the wedding – he said if they lost he wasn’t going to get married. Harley organized a bunch of people to hold crossed baseball bats, with wrist corsages around the handles, over the center aisle as the bridal party passed through, and there was some kind of joke about hit the cutoff man all evening at the wedding.
There’re a ton more pictures, of the wedding, and of our weekend in Santa Fe. On Friday night, we had the rehearsal dinner at Rancho de Chimayo, and John could not stop crying, so I spent a lot of time walking him in the restaurant parking lot, and my dad took pictures – John was the first grandchild, afterall.
