Life Sketches by Terry Berskon
Father of the man

Several years ago I received a wedding announcement from my cousin Francine who lived in the town of Savigny Sur Orge, which is a 20-minute train ride from Paris, France.

She said that her son Ben had finally married his girlfriend whom he had been living with for ten years. The girl, Isabelle, is a doctor and comes from a small French village where there hadn’t been a wedding for 17 years, so theirs was a grand occasion where almost the entire village population attended. Ben and Isabelle worked for Doctors Without Borders and had made friends in many countries from which about 130 people came to attend. Francine wrote that the wedding party walked along cobblestone paths accompanied by musicians who played instruments dating from the middle ages. The reception was held at an old castle and because a majority of the guests were from Latin America, much of the music was from Mexico and Brazil.