Edited to fit your screen

My aunt, my father’s younger-by-nearly-a-decade sister, got married when I was in the eighth grade, and her wedding was the first one which I attended and was old enough to be aware of. (I had previously been at the wedding of my mother’s younger brother, but I was a gleefully oblivious toddler at the time.) Apparently the first thirteen or so years of my life were fairly devoid of formal occasions, because the whole celebration, wedding ceremony and reception combined, more or less blew me away, and when I got back to school the following Monday I could not wait to tell my friends all about it. And I did, in painfully exhaustive detail. Honestly, I still remember a few snatches of detail from my aunt’s wedding day some twenty-three years later, but I remember much more vividly how I started regaling my friends with the play-by-play as soon as I got off the bus in the morning, and put a pin in the story when the homeroom bell rang, and resumed the story at the cafeteria table during lunch, and put a pin in it AGAIN, and finally ran down the last of my recollections some time after school.

I also vividly remember a growing sense of horror as the day went along and I realized that my story wasn’t really going anywhere and didn’t really have a point and probably wasn’t going to have a payoff and definitely wasn’t going to have the kind of payoff that would remotely justify the fact that I had been monopolizing everyone’s attention all day. At the time, the whole big major family event had seemed so grandiose and important down to every last detail, but I knew with ever-more-sickening surety as my recap went on and on and ON that I was failing, somehow, to capture that or convey it to my friends.

And in its own way that’s a pretty formative experience in my life because it was a gut-wrenching lesson learned. My friends, to be fair, didn’t give me that hard a time about it, so it’s not their brutal scorn or an apoplectic story-squelching outburst I remember. As in most cases, the rueful regret begins and ends inside my overactive mind. Still, it’s a set of lessons I’m glad that I’ve learned: to respect people’s time and attention when they give it to you; to recognize that a laundry list of things that happened, however outside-the-norm they may have been for you at the time, does not constitute an engaging anecdote fit for others’ consumption; to figure out if you even have a point when you start talking and then either get to it if you do or shut up if you don’t. I meet people now and then (present office-mate included) who apparently have never learned these lessons and I know that once upon a time, our positions were reversed.


All of which I will allow to stand in the place of an epic blow-by-blow account of the previous weekend in which my brother and sister-in-law formally celebrated the marriage which had been legally officiated at the beginning of the year. Were there a few travel mishaps on our nation’s interstate highway system? Indeed. Was the experience of gathering with pretty damn near my entire extended family a bittersweet combination of pleasant reunions and more than a few passive-aggressively induced guilt trips about how long it’s been since I’ve seen or talked to some of them? But of course. Did the little guy break the heart of everyone he came in contact with through sheer cuteness? Clearly the world would have gone mad if the answer were anything other than “yes”.

Of course all of the above is my perspective on things and the weekend really was not about me, so rest assured that I asked both bride and groom repeatedly if they were having fun and were happy and received nothing but grinning confirmations of those states in return, so I’d have to call the event a success in every way that matters. And there may be a few moments of exceptional notability which I will refer to in days to come but right now I’m still in the post-party haze where it’s hard to separate anything out from the overall swirl. For now I’m simply content to note that we drove what seemed like about 500 miles each way, we had a good time in between, and now we’re back and none the worse for wear.