Dear Dude-O-Mine,
Six years ago today you started the day with a round of golf at Spring Hills Golf Course in Watsonville with your best man and groomsmen. Meanwhile, your mother and aunt took care of all the little wedding details that you weren’t aware of and I was too over-caffeinated to be bothered with. For my part I did my level best to refrain from throttling my would-be photographer (a no-show), make sure I gave the correct directions to an all-volunteer brass quintet (thank you again fellas), and remember the flowers (I was 1 for 3… the bridesmaids bouquets were left behind in a refrigerator, a $120 omission that was only discovered five minutes before the wedding ceremony started.)
In retrospect it’s a good thing your aunt and mother were in charge of the food and booze because if those crucial elements had been left up to us, our wedding guests would no doubt have ended up hitting the Liquor Barn in Santa Cruz immediately after the ceremony. In fact, it’s a good thing that pretty much every wedding detail was left to your aunt and mother because if I remember right your idea of wedding music was Metallica and I was so disenchanted with shopping for wedding attire that my bridesmaids and I went through the ceremony and reception barefoot. Well, except my brother, who bucked the barefoot trend because he was already pissed off enough about being made a “bridesmaid”. That’s the breaks Matt. Maybe when you get married to Blondie you can make me a “groomsman” and then giggle at your sweet revenge. Until then, you will always be my favorite gender-challenged bridesmaid.
Anyway sweetheart, while your aunt and mother bustled around performing minor miracles, you and I surprised even ourselves when we managed to show up to the designated location sober! and properly attired!
So after a quick exchange of vows (throughout which I shook more than a Parkinson’s patient while one of our flower girls farted, loudly and continuously, into the tiny plastic chairs provided for the kids in the wedding party) we paraded to the reception at which my siblings visited revenge upon me while your best man forgot his speech. Even DDQ got in on the embarrassment action with a speech that… shall we say? Was chastening.
Hey, at least the view from our suite at Seascape that evening was worth remaining sober enough to drive for, right?
Anyway, where does that leave us? Oh yeah… six years later, after the wedding, the honeymoon that almost didn’t happen because of 9/11-related airport closures, the move two weeks later to San Jose and then subsequent move two years after that back to Sacramento, one apartment, two homes, and one rental, several career changes, a daughter, six football seasons, hundreds of arguments, half a dozen vehicles, a few deaths, a few births, an ever-developing tolerance for each other’s bullshit, several family vacations, and an ever-increasing chokehold on one another’s heartstrings. And here we are.
…and if statistics don’t lie you get to put up with this for at least another fifty years. Get a helmet.