The Wedding Thinger

In which our Hero fails to miss a wedding

Ever since I decided, some years ago, that I’m not going to be a slave to the web of presumed obligation, I’ve refused to go to weddings. The gifting doesn’t bother me, the dress is fun for me, but I don’t enjoy sitting for several hours for banquet dining, which is almost reliably, in my experience, unfulfilling in every sense of the word except for the receptacle at the end of the alimentary journey.

Meanwhile, in exchange for tiny portions of slowly dispensed poorly cooked distemperate food, I get to sit at the fringe of the crowd, pressed to the children’s table or the odds-and-sods table by virtue of the general distance of my relationships to the bride or the groom. Which means that I await my meager ration of overpriced gruel unable to either meditate or read because I am socially obligated to make small-talk with the effective strangers that I’ve been sentenced to accompany.

So as a matter of policy, I have spent the last few years opting out. I mean, I still go to events out of a sense of obligation, but now it’s gone from “Oh, they invited me to their important event, so I have to answer that courtesy” to “Is this person Important or just acquaintance?” and life is easier, simpler, and happier. I don’t feel as frustrated by the things that take me away from my cave.

This time, this wedding, it was a cousin who is a little bit on the bubble. We grew up together, we played together, but as we got older the age and personality gaps have not really made our social selves cross. But he’s in on the important side of the equation, and anyway, his parents are my godparents and even if I was ready to decline him, I can’t decline them. All things equal, I’d have gone to the church service and called it a day, but giving up a few hours to “celebrate” seems like the right thing to do. On the other hand, I was actively dreading it.

Both of those reactions were correct. It was a good thing to go to, and I was bored out of my skull.

It was an enjoyable wedding in some regards. The couple is multi-ethnic, and that brought very different cultures together in a beautiful melange of cultural confusion and more foreigners than natives in foreign dress, which was a hoot, but also very sweet and inclusive. On the other hand, when the bride glided down the aisle, sheathed in a white, bare-shouldered gown, I think I could hear the eyes on my side of the family popping as we collectively discovered her back was covered by a broad tattoo. I know I’m old school, but I think that the sin isn’t the tattoo, it’s that the tattoo is a pattern that clashes with the dress. My side of the family comes from a more parochial sense of morality, still in reach of colonial Victorian mores, so they were fairly scandalized. I could tell from the wide-eyed “did you see that!” looks from family members and then from the chatter afterward.

The reception was held at a converted church, offering a cool industrial-decay sensibility to the proceedings. Well, actually, to be honest, it looked like an abandoned church, at the edge of another lot already clad for demolition. Perhaps that’s judgmental, but it’s only the fact that I scouted the location on the web that I knew the address wasn’t a mistake. (Oh, and the parking lot that had specifically been pointed out at the wedding service? Yeah, that was 100% booked by another wedding so nobody knew where to park, and I solved the problem by grabbing a metered spot and just running out to add quarters till the night was done.)

The place also offered stairs. Loads and loads of stairs. Stairs from the street to the lobby, stairs from the lobby to the first floor, stairs to the balcony that had been converted into a lounge-ish hall space with a single couch as seating for the hundred-odd gathered. For the older folks, it was long trip up to stand around. Fortunately I’d guided my sheep there early and they got to sit, otherwise I’d have been angry. As it was, I transitioned into an usher for the event (I’m family, after all. Right?) and fetched a chair for my cousin’s new frail grandmother-in-law, before steering families and the frail into the dining area.

And then came the discovery that the restrooms were down those stairs, and down another set of stairs, till you got to the basement, looped under the stage. Which was hard enough to just find, but again irritated me as I tried to direct people. Till we found another set of restrooms behind the stage that had replaced the altar.

The hors d’oeuvres were frankly delicious. Well, two out of three were, and the third was still okay in texture. Cherry tomatoes stuffed with grated cheese in balsamic vinegar that tasted like a miniature caprese salad, a bland macaroni in pastry and a sublime roast beef in a pastry capped with whipped horseradish cream. I swear, it was like prime-rib kisses. But I am a man of adventurous palate, trained to dishes around the world. My side of the family are not as adventurous nor as trained. And even if they were up for the experience, there was a much greater logistical issue, which is that the kitchen was issuing these things in groups of 5. Over a hundred hungry people, and little teaser snacks in dribbles. A few people near the stairs got food. Most of the trays were half empty by the time they got to the lounges.

One… call her an aunt… caught up to me on the stairs as I was ushing to complain. Awkward to be the recipient of venting about someone else’s party, but in any case, I listened as she complained, “There’s no food.” I pointed out that there was service and first she ridiculed the fact that they came in trays of five, but was interrupted by the arrival of one of the servers. I pointed out the food on the tray, but her wrath was at full sail now and she tore into the hapless fellow whose only mistake was accepting a shift for that night. “How care you call yourself a reception all and not have food? Do you think 5 cherry tomatoes are going to feed all these people? And have you tasted them? They’re disgusting! Disgusting!”

I couldn’t ring a bell to end the round, but I got the waiter moving back to the crowd and sent the lady off to find the restrooms, and that was how I occupied myself for a while. Then I went to puzzle out where I was sitting, but my biggest moment of genius was to simply take a look at the chart one of the other cousins had printed. What I didn’t realize till later was that the childish looking display in one of the windows was actually a hanging seating chart, with place cards that we could pull off the ribbon and claim. Good idea, but I wish there had been a sign or explanation.

Dinner was spent seated, yet again, at the kids table. I don’t fault my hosts, as always, I’m an odd number that they had to deal with and I have no real peers. The grooms sister is Ice and close, but they cleverly sat the little-kid families at singleton tables which allowed them to contain the disruptions and to serve easier, but after that, all I’ve got are my boys the Bobs and their elder siblings. Who I love a great deal but as sweet as they are to try to include me, I don’t fit with them. They are from the cool kid demographic and now and always I am not.

And that made for a bit of a tedious dinner making small talk. I’m variably good at small talk and this was a case of me being far from my game. I was happy for the groom, for my family, but ready to go home. And so I sat through the speeches (which were actually pretty good) and through the Bobs performing a rap act to celebrate their big cousin. (Plus they gave me a tandem autograph which I have saved with other mementos from their respective childhoods).

One thing about the speeches, actually from before the event. My father wondered if I might be called to serve in the wedding party, as I was tapped as my uncle’s pallbearer. But the latter was a selection that was as much about being a grown man still strong of back rather than strictly familial priority. I assured my father that I was unlikely to be in any more wedding parties, which I’m okay with. But one of the younger groomsmen, a son of that uncle, talked about the groom his cousin. About the care he’d received and the hero worship which we all remember. About looking up to the guy. It was a loud, raucous, and also very funny speech that even joked about his own bout of stage fright a decade before at Ice’s wedding.

It made me a little jealous, I’m embarrassed to admit. Not because I lack for that kind of connection to my younger cousins, but because I’m not sure there’s anybody who would talk about it, in those terms. Not out loud, where people could hear them. My care has always been quieter, gentler, and I have no question of my impact or importance but… I wonder what it’d be like to have someone say that kind of stuff about me. Probably mortifyingly embarrassing with my avoidance of the spotlight. (smile) I can’t even truly say that I wish for it… But I’m still jealous of that moment of recognition. Funny bit of self-knowledge that.

In any case, dinner was… honestly spectacular. Again, something of a challenge for the people in my family who aren’t used to melting-soft cooked roast, but the steak was superb to me. The other dishes were evidently less satisfying. And then the dancing broke out, and to my amused surprised, the parties that I’d driven to the event were all pushing off from their tables to leave. It took a half hour past that to locate my father, tucked in a corner chatting with a friend, and another half hour after *that* for him to take his leave.

And on the ride home, I heard about “The tattoos” and “the drinking” and “the food” and the “appetizers.” I’ve been defending the event, a little, to my folks. My father agrees with me and my mother… accepts the possibility that the complaints of the event are more of a mismatch in tastes between our young, modern, westernized couple and our almost anachronistic family set in their old ways. She thinks that as hosts they should have considered this, and that his parents should have helped to moderate things a little.

But they are young, in love, and now bound to their new life together. And for all that I would much rather have spent the night home reading or watching a movie, I was there to see them start, and it was good. Even if it wasn’t all that great.

(laugh) Was a time, I used to be able to tell stories.