MY FIRST TIME

ONCE THERE WAS a little bug-faced toddler in a pink snowsuit, wearing a black knit cap with a Sonic Youth logo across the front. (Her dad was clearly a Gen Xer with a well-honed sense of irony.) One day she was 7, in tap shoes onstage at the Masonic Temple in Allentown, Pennsylvania, looking worriedly out into the audience until I slid into my seat, and she gave me an enormous smile. Then she was 15, running across a vast green lawn with a field hockey stick in her hands, having scored her first-ever goal. In another instant she was in my rearview mirror, waving goodbye, a tear running down her face as I pulled out of the parking lot of her college campus.

Then, just moments later, she walked through the door of a bar in Brooklyn on a warm September day, flanked by her sisters and stepmom. She was wearing a bridal dress.

They say that when a truck is bearing down on you, your life flashes before your eyes. When your daughter’s marriage is bearing down on you, it’s her life that flickers by in an instant.

As the rest of the family gathered upstairs for the rooftop wedding, the bride and I stood alone together, waiting for the signal to climb the stairs and start our walk down the aisle. I wish I could share the profound words that passed between us in that moment, but there weren’t any. Just an immense and overwhelming feeling that we were both in the right place, at the right time, doing exactly the right thing. Which, in the end, is all one can hope for.

The wedding went off without a hitch. The after-party went until 4 in the morning.

“Dad, we’re so happy,” the new bride texted me from the airport on her way to Italy for her honeymoon.

Yeah, kid. Me too. —Stephen Perrine