Iron Fist

I went to a wedding of one of my best friends yesterday morning, along with Niels and Sibyl, the three of us representing the old residence hall where we’d all met. We left home early, before the clouds could get their act together and bring us April showers as we made our way to the college town where the bride and groom had decided to tie the knot.

It was a non-traditional style of wedding, which is fine with me since as a pragmatist I have little use for tradition for tradition’s sake, and since I can find weddings rather tedious it’s nice when they mix it up a little to keep me interested.

We arrived more or less right on schedule for the brunch to start, this pre-ception serving the place of a reception that might otherwise take place after the wedding, this being the time to mingle and shake hands and congratulate and reminisce and eat scrambled eggs and scones. And there was a game to play as well, where each table had questions to ask about the couple which coincided quite nicely with other questions we’d brought with us, and all the gathered friends and family with their name tags smartly in place were encouraged to fill out the questionnaires and speculate about first dates and first kisses and first meetings with parents. At last they stood hand in hand and walked us through the answers one by one, all the while the love and loyalty for my friends pulling me in different directions inside as they had all morning, the torque between their respective dipole moments making my heart ache.

Then the time came for us to share stories about the bride and groom before the assembled guests, and I thought about the bottle of Patrón Reposado I’d bought for us to drink when Joe turned twenty-one, and throwing knives at the bulletin board on the wall between our rooms and running down a dirt road in a small town in the middle of night while we laughed like happy fools with beer cans in hand; I thought about shows at Dante’s and karaoke and cigars and corned beef and carrying couches and how he’d had at least five can openers for some reason when we shared a kitchen as suite mates; I thought about parties at the end of long weeks and hanging out of truck windows and arm-wrestling in bars and any number of other adventures since we’d all known each other that I couldn’t quite bring myself to divulge in front of aging grandparents and impressionable cousins. Niels diplomatically saved the day by telling everyone that Joe kept us in line and out of trouble when we were his charges, but never so much so that we didn’t have fun. And I shook hands with Joe’s uncles and brother and father and mother and told them all that yes, Joe was our RA, and as you can see we clearly all turned out fine, just as you always expected we would.

Brunch came to an end and Joe and Dusti went off to spend some time taking pictures, and we went off together to spend some time drinking vodka, this being a college town and so surely there must be a bar nearby, but we didn’t get that much time with our vodka because we drank it down so quickly.

We sat around our table and reminisced and asked each other the questions that single people invariably ask each other when they go to weddings about whether or not we could see ourselves getting married someday, and I tried not to dwell on my answer of no, not really, not any more.

It stopped raining and the time was getting nearer so we drove back to campus with fried food in our bellies and five rounds of drinks under our belts and discovered that no imaginable force was able to get the lid off of Niels’ flask to get at the whiskey within, but we’d probably had enough already anyway and it wouldn’t do to blow our cover now, we’d already made it this far passing ourselves off as fine upstanding young people to all present.

We did a reasonably good job of sitting still for the ceremony, finding another cohort in the crowd to sit with while they read their vows. And then they were husband and wife all of a sudden, and then they were kissing, and we stood up and clapped and then they were gone, already down the aisle and out of the building and off to start their new life together.

And we left, too, back to Portland, and found we needed some more time still and so Bar of the Gods it was, until we’d said everything there was to say and were completely spent on our ups and downs and it was time to finally sleep it off.

***

I’m happy for my friends, I really am. I’m just a little maudlin today, which is no doubt a partial result of having something like a dozen drinks yesterday. Tomorrow I’ll be back to being entertaining again, but tonight I had to get this all out.