2005-09-23 - 7:56 p.m.
Note: This is the blog I was “writing” when I posted an entry on underwear instead. Now, when I “write” a blog, I don’t actually have like a pen or pencil or a laptop or anything in hand. No, I actually write stuff in my head. I have this bizarre capacity for memorizing several pages of text at a time, so by the time I actually sit at my computer, it’s pretty well kept intact. But apparently there’s an expiry date for memorizing specific entries, which I’ve sadly hit this time. I’ll try to write something in the same spirit, but it won’t be as fresh as the original. Sorry.
A Tale of Two Weddings
I’m not a big fan of weddings, I’ll admit it. I don’t like going to other people’s and I wasn’t looking forward to attending my own. Even as a little girl, I never had dreams of a big fancy wedding. I would certainly dream of my handsome prince, and often imagined being married to a grad student or maybe a professor, and living in some cozy campus housing, and I’d dress up in tights and a kicky kilt skirt, and yes, I realize I probably fell asleep watching Love Story a few too many times.
My prince turned out to be a construction worker and not an academic, so we couldn’t live on a campus, but I still wanted to spend the rest of my life with him. I don’t believe in living together without being married, so I was going to have to bite the bullet and have a wedding of some sort.
Well, I planned the smallest wedding I could possibly have and still keep my parents happy. To be honest, I’m sure they were even happier as I’m their only daughter (among five sons) and didn’t ask them to pay for any of it. It was on a rainy Seattle day almost twenty years ago, on the shores of Lake Union, in the same restaurant that my brother held his rehearsal dinner. I wore a $36 dress and hired a Justice of the Peace. We served lunch and champagne for less than 40 people (mostly family) but completely forgot about music. Oh well. Everyone had a nice time and even though we asked for no presents, we got a few anyway.
And I got a really nice husband out of the bargain. We’re still together nearly twenty years later. We’ve been through some tough times, as every married person has, but we’re probably happier now than we’ve ever been, likely the result of making it through the rough patches together. Marriage is a serious commitment, and even though nobody else can irritate me more than he does at times, I can’t imagine a life without him. [/sap]
Anyway...isn’t there supposed to be a second wedding in here somewhere? Oh yes. Now, hubby and I splurged and spent our honeymoon night at the Four Seasons Hotel in Seattle. Very swanky, but it didn’t really matter.
Fast forward to summer of 2004 and our first visit back to the Four Seasons. Hubby’s nephew is getting married and having his reception there. Well, kinda. He’d actually got married four years earlier after he knocked up his girlfriend. But that wasn’t a real wedding. No. They only had a judge, and they didn’t get to dress up in fancy clothes or have a roomful of candles or get expensive presents. It didn’t really count.
Ignore the fact that they’re already legally married and that nothing will change after they march their friends down the aisle in matching outfits and force a captive audience to listen to some weird priestess woman go on and on and on in her speech about how special the two of them are. And how they’ve even got God on their side now, which they didn’t before. Even though it was a “little gift from God” that forced that horrid civil wedding in the first place. I rolled my eyes as she shared way too much personal information about my nephew and his wife (is this a new trend? did I really need to know that she likes the boyish gleam in his eyes when she wakes up in the morning or that she feels safe in his strong arms?) and started talking to my brother-in-law, who’d forgot to bring black socks, so he had to wear his dress shoes commando. Hee. It was funny. Hubby elbowed me and told me to be respectful, but I’m sorry, it wasn’t a real wedding in my mind anyway, and I really didn’t need to know that when they met at a party in NYC, they spent the whole night “talking and getting close.” I swear, if I was a drinker, which I’m not, I was two beers away from asking priestess how many times he f*cked her.
Anyway, we all got to eat really expensive food in our assigned seats and dance to a live jazz band in a room with a fountain. The newly married couple’s four-year old daughter even got to partake in the festivities. Look at all those presents on the gift table. I guess I was wrong. For this was a real wedding. Everything a wedding should be. No detail was too small to overlook. (Although no one noticed that I took an extra box of truffles from the pretty little table of favors. Hee.) This wedding was, in a word, P.E.R.F.E.C.T.
Too bad the marriage only lasted six months.
Hmmm. I wonder what she did with the top tier of the cake on their first anniversary? Maybe she shared it with her new boyfriend.
Did I mention that I had cheesecake at my wedding?
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