RSSWedding Tales: It All Begins Somewhere
Feb 04
Relationships Wedding Comments Off
This wedding tale begins with the groom. I met him in college. His favorite story about me is that my first sentence to him was “Fuck you.” He said something that ticked me off, provoked me into that kind of response to a stranger. What it was? It doesn’t matter; he was that kind of person. (Still is.) Later on, I loaned him a blanket to use.
Flash forward to a few years later.
Okay, the bride entered the picture through a secretive office romance. It is always difficult as a third party to fully realize what attracts two people together. Some couples are mirror images of each other. Identical twins with identical temperaments. Like someone standing next to a mirror and performing all the motions of life with their reflection mimicking every movement.
The other end of the spectrum, and this fits better for Groom and Bride, are polar opposites that are united through some invisible screen. One is the pole and the other is the tether ball. As the ball gets punched around, the other keeps the relationship grounded. Some couples switch their roles back and forth. Some are always the pole, some always the ball.
I like Groom and Bride both. I am acutely aware of their individual idiosyncrasies. He has never been on time to save his life, or anybody else’s. I’m being generous. She’s a smoker. Yuck. But they are both loyal friends and I love being invited over for dinner because it means I eat better than if I cook for myself.
Is that all you need to know? I will be driving down for the wedding rehearsal, then the wedding is on a Saturday, and coming back home Sunday afternoon. It all sounds simple and linear. Funny how in the planning, most of life does.
Oh, the wedding is on Long Island. Might as well be a foreign country. No idea. I was studying a map of LI and it is just a weird shape and it freaks me out. I can make it through Manhattan as long as I am on my way to somewhere else. But to drive around Manhattan to end up on Key West, yeah we’ll see. The directions are tricky and involve a lot of foreign words like Wantagh and Nesconset. The trip to the hotel is mostly highway driving so I’ll make it.
On weddings in general. First, they are clearly intended to suck as much money out of your wallet as humanly possible. The Bride and Groom pay the up sell price on everything just because it’s a wedding, and then try to pass off the cost to the guests. Second, people are so bent on tradition that they become cannot seem to function without an exhaustive list of steps from the proposal to the marital bed. Third, I think the responsibility of the guests to support the couple during the first year of marriage is magnanimous, but it really should be the choice of the guests; not some tally the groom and bride keep in their back pocket to measure success.
I have, though, been to some fine weddings. The last one, my sister’s three hundred guest affair, really hit the romantic notes that I fantasize weddings should be about. And my friend Kerri got married in a simple and elegant affair. The dining was outdoors, which is like death in my opinion, but it was a gorgeous overcast day in San Diego and there were about 20 people and it was short and lovely and she looked stunning.
I went to one wedding where the dj played James Brown’s “I Feel Good” perfectly timed for the kiss-the-bride moment but managed to scare the living shit out of the guests.
Every good wedding story begins somewhere. I don’t know how they met, or what they saw in each other; this is my tale after all. So for me, the story begins, truly begins just days before the grand event itself.
