Photo courtesy of April Rew/Local Nomad Photo
By John Murphy
I shouldn’t have been surprised last week but I was. Surprised, that is, the Texas wedding of Redlands High graduate Felicia “Mafel” Lopez and college sweetheart Tenari Tenari of Long Beach has been postponed.
Why? That dreaded novel coronavirus, of course.
Full disclosure, Mafel is my unofficial daughter-in-law since her mom, Maria, is my longtime girl friend.
“Alright alright alright, so we have some news: We made the very difficult decision to postpone our wedding celebration,” Mafel said on the couple’s wedding site. “This was going to be a special day that is years in the making, the last year being spent on planning a beautiful event that not only celebrated us, but you as well.”
The main issues for the Allen, Texas residents were travel and the inability of guests from Southern California to fly to the Dallas/Fort Worth area — as well as following the directives of the Center for Disease Control to not let too many people gather.
It all adds up to a bummer – at least temporarily – for the couple who met while taking computer-related classes at UC-Riverside. Both now work in Plano.
“At first, I didn’t really think about COVID-19 affecting my wedding, until events and places like Coachella and Disneyland started closing or being postponed,” Mafel said.
Dashed along with the April ceremony were plans for Mafel’s grandmother, Aurora, to transform fabric and lace into a beautiful wedding gown.
So did the young woman go full Bride-zilla with the development? Hardly. But she did say it was painful.
“I was on autopilot the rest of the week,” she said. “It was not until the end of the week when I had nothing left to do (that) my emotions caught up to me. I cried that night.”
By the next morning she had moved ahead — tackling home improvement projects with her fiance to keep her minds off things.
Speaking as the unofficial father-in-law, I am proud of the young woman I first met when she was just 14, handling things with such clarity and poise.
Said Mafel, “It’s sad to think that a lot of work was put into this, but it doesn’t mean it won’t happen. I read somewhere that postponing is like being given a gift that you can’t open, but you just gotta wait a little bit more to open it.”
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