She's getting married in an apple orchard of all places. I'm not quite sure why an apple orchard—best not to ask—but I am sure it is going to be a beautiful summer wedding and she is going to be a lovely bride.

I find myself happy for her and sad for myself.

Of course, it doesn't matter that I am sad for myself. What's important is that she have a wonderful wedding and a happy marriage. I'm not sad about that. I've met her husband-to-be and I like him and I think he'll make her very happy.

It's just that I remember very vividly when she was born. I wasn't quite in the delivery room—they wouldn't let grandfathers in—although almost everyone else was there, including her dad, her grandmother and her aunt. But I did get to see her as soon as they wheeled her mother and her down the hall. She was a beautiful baby, and even then her eyes were wide open, snapping with anticipation of things to come, ready to challenge the world.

That seems, as the cliché goes, only yesterday. Soon she was 3, a blonde-haired lively child, a sort of a sprite. She seemed never to stop moving.

She never had much doubt about herself, even then. Even at 7 she was brimming with self-confidence.

I remember once when I came to pick her up after a church day camp. She and about 150 other kids had been on a bus trip somewhere, and there were boys and girls charging all over the place. She marched up to me with great assurance, took my hand reassuringly and said, "Come on, Grandpa, don't be scared. I'll help you find the car."

But then she's always been like that.

She's also always loved to perform, to dance about like a beam of light. Once her grandmother and I took her to the Monterey Bay Aquarium for the day and she suddenly got up in front of the sea otter tank as they dived in and out of the water and did a dance. It wasn't long before she had the aquarium visitors watching her, not the otters. When she was older, she was often an actress in the musical plays her day-care center used to give. She always knew her lines and she performed without a sign of stage fright.

Later she worked at the same day-care facility as a kind of teacher's assistant, and so it wasn't much of a surprise when she announced on entering college that she was going to be a teacher.

Maybe it's in the genes. Her dad's a teacher and so was her other grandmother. She just seems to take naturally to small children, to understand how they feel and to be able to help them.

And yet, I think, she has grown up awfully fast, just as did her mother and her aunt. One minute she was a little tow-headed kid and the next she was as tall as her mother and as instructional as her father.

And I suppose it is the rapidity with which she grew that bothers me as much as the fact that she is old enough to get married. For it means that I have grown that much older, too. Of course, my growing now is on the down side of life, while hers is on an ascending path. She has life to look forward to. I have something less.

But one thing I do have is to wait and wish to see her coming down the aisle—or whatever takes the place of an aisle in the apple orchard—on the arm of her dad, who, I know, will be at least twice as proud as I will be. I suppose that will remind me of an even older memory: of that day more than 50 years ago that I saw her grandmother coming down the church aisle on the arm of her stepfather.

Marriage is a ritual, a sacrament, a time of celebration, an event to remember and to cherish, whether that wedding is yours or your granddaughter's.

It's also a milestone, a division between the time when you are only one person and when you become something more, the integral part of a shared life. The world now and then laments the stresses and strains on marriage as an institution. Many couples live together without being formally wed, but it seems to me after all the years of my own marriage and the prospect of my granddaughter's coming nuptials that there really is no substitute for getting married.

Marriage is more than the parts of its whole, it is the whole, it's the ceremony, the preparation, the memory, the bearing of children and their upbringing. Even though it fails—and it fails frequently these days—it is still the glue that binds us together. Without it, we become lost souls, looking again for its promise.

It's a bittersweet time. The world will never again be quite so fresh or so wonderful or so charged with memory as it will be on the day when your first granddaughter gets married.

Carl Heintze is a frequent contributor to the Willow Glen Resident.