When the cicadas rasp and click in cooling evening breezes, in that twilight as summer fades and autumn looms, comes the season of separation.

Across the street the other day, little Jeremy Garskof was bursting at the seams, his name tag fluttering as he waited for the yellow bus with its array of blinking lights to roll up and whisk him away to the brand new world of kindergarten. His mother, Deborah, sat nearby, camera in hand, her face a maternal mixture of happiness and maybe just a touch of anxiety. She clearly had done her homework, though, in preparing Jeremy for this moment.

“They have chocolate milk there!” he yelled to me.

All around town, the cars have been loaded and the college freshmen shipped from the house for the first time.

There are tryouts for teams and the gut-wrenching process of separating the better from the good.

The school buses roll. Fuel trucks can't be far behind. The train rolls on.

Last Saturday, Colin Daly, our son, the little boy who Mrs. Daly, the former Sharon Tierney, once packed off to kindergarten took a bride, a sweet, considerate young woman named Trisha Limatola. She is a new Mrs. Daly in the community. Some snapshots from a wedding:

  • Friday morning, driving with Colin back from Norwalk on Interstate 95, where we picked up our Oscar de la Rental tuxedoes, rain fell as heavily as it can.
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    Windshield wipers on triple-time couldn't keep up with it. Colin was, shall we say, downhearted. The rehearsal party was to be outside that night, not to mention the wedding and reception on Saturday.

I turned on the radio, WCBS to be exact, just in time to hear a tornado warning issued for Manhattan. It was hard not to hear in the dead silence of this white-knuckle drive.

Interject some levity, I said to myself. “Wow, Col, someday you'll be telling people there was a tornado warning on the day of your wedding, and you'll laugh.” He wasn't laughing.

I called Ann Dunleavey Eisenman, our hostess for the evening at her home in Black Rock and the most resourceful person I know, and said we ought to consider a Plan B.

Suffice it to say that by that evening, with the good graces and patient help from her husband, Gerry, the patio where we'd put up tables and seating for 50 the night before, was covered with tents.

Of course, setting up the tents assured us of no rain.

  •  Saturday morning, 11 a.m. A candle burns on the window ledge over the kitchen sink. Mrs. Daly likes candles, but 11 a.m. seemed a bit early. But next to the candle was a little statue Christ as the Infant of Prague facing out at the gray sky. The appeal to higher powers for no rain was multi-deistic. In the dining room a candle burned next to a little stone figure of Buddha.
  •  When my mother, yet another Mrs. Daly, was cracking the whip over my freckled little head to keep up with my piano practicing, she would preach, “Some day you'll be glad you know how to play the piano.” Okay, she was right.

Last Saturday, it was a father's exquisite pleasure to play a duet with his youngest daughter, Julia, on violin, at the wedding. Pachelbel's “Canon in D Major” may have had more finished presentations, but it never had one more heartfelt.

The old man bungled a measure or two midway through, but recovered nicely for a spirited finish. Julia played the piece's runs flawlessly.

  •  First Church Congregational on the Old Post Road in Fairfield would be beautiful even without its famed Tiffany windows. But put the setting aside, the Rev. David Spollett, who has now performed three family weddings, officiated with verve and insight.

He reminded them that the test of love does not come on grand occasions, like wedding days, but in “the prosaic details of life.” And he urged them to look in the mirror occasionally and ask, “What is it like to be married . to me.”

  •  With the band Celebration behind him, Nick Limatola, father of the bride, took the stage at Darien's Meadowlands to toast the couple and then, with a composure and voice to envy sang “What a Wonderful World.”
  • On John Mayer's new album, “Continuum,” is a song called “Stop This Train.” Saturday morning, the wedding still a few hours off, I listened to it.

It is an arresting creation, a beautiful pairing of words and music about the flight of time and dreams. You can't stop the train, John, his father tells him. And the older you get, the more you want to stay on the train.

  •  The dancing grew feverish as the night went on, drowning out the night sounds and holding off thoughts of the looming autumn. The music quieted, though, when Colin and his mother took to the floor and danced.

Their song was “Forever Young.”

Michael J. Daly is the managing editor of the Connecticut Post. You can reach him at 203-330-6394 or by e-mail at mdaly@ctpost.com.