My sister was married in Memphis, in 1960, in a beige two-piece suit she chose herself, with beige lace covering the jacket and a matching pillbox hat. She was seventeen. I was in first grade. I remember her showing me a picture of her outfit before the day, wanting me to understand its elegance and worldliness. I think at the time I did—though it was a very different thing to look back at that glamorous choice forty-some years later, when I was writing a memoir concerned with the process of esthetic education. How long had it been since I thought of the wedding outfit! There it was, in memory, as if it had been folded carefully in some drawer in the mind, still that stiff rustle to its pearly underlining, luster unchanged by time—which is the ironic way of memory. Things you remember often change and date, any more immediate perception replaced by the stories we tell about them. But that which we don't know we remember—well, those things seem untouched.

Why, in the Tennessee of 1960, would a young woman choose not to wear a white dress? What was being announced? Did she, I wonder, make that choice herself? Did my parents, knowing she was a few months pregnant, forbid virginal white, or was my sister being proudly modern, a young woman ahead of her time?