The Marriage Files

Even with the mistakes, we’d made it through the ceremony with no major foul-ups. Now it was time for the celebration. Our idea for the whole day was to have a garden party at which a wedding just happened to take place. That’s why we decided to hold the reception outdoors at our home.

Everything went well through the meal. There were the small miscalculations, of course. We ran out of one entrée, but that’s because nearly all of the supposed vegetarians opted for the filet. Go figure. More distressingly, we got the balance of beer to wine completely wrong and one family member valiantly made liquor store runs all afternoon. (Tip #6: Even if you let the caterer make all the food decisions, trust your instincts when it comes to the alcohol. If there’s one thing you probably know about your friends with any accuracy, it’s their drinking habits.)

All in all, things went swimmingly right up until dessert. Now, you need to understand that our property has one major drawback as a substitute for a banquet hall: not one square foot of it is completely flat. Every single one of the tables we’d set out on the lawn was tilted to one degree or another, and take my word for it, a tilt of a couple of degrees gives gravity a very unfair advantage over a wedding cake. This simple fact was further complicated by our choice of cake. Instead of the conventional tiered batter cake, we had more of a torte, with many thin, crisp cake layers alternating with a custardy filling and lots of fresh fruit. To get a good idea of its stability, imagine a Leaning Tower of Pisa in which every other floor has been replaced with Jello. Throw in a warm June day and, well, you can guess the rest.

With all the factors working against it, the wonder is that the cake stayed intact as long as it did. The caterer’s assistant carried it to the serving table with the same care required of a circus performer balancing deadly objects while riding a unicycle. K— and I managed to extract a piece as if we were a team of crackerjack explosives experts defusing a bomb. We put morsels of cake into each other’s mouths and the guests clapped politely. Probably thinking he was home free at this point, K— reached over and innocently plucked a dangling raspberry from one of the custard layers. Alas, it was evidently a structural raspberry, because the cake suddenly toppled over and the layers fanned out like a deck of cards across the table linens. The poor caterers, mortified, scurried to jack the cake back up and reinforce it. Bristling like a porcupine with toothpicks and kebab skewers, it was finally cut and our guests were kind enough to ignore where it had been and eat it. (Tip #7: For good or bad, your wedding will provide ample opportunities to find out who your friends really are.)

Now, if the prospect of eating at an angle seems challenging enough to you, imagine what it was like trying to use the portable toilet. We foresaw the fundamental problem and tried to prop it up the night before so it was reasonably flat. Easier said than done, we discovered, but at least it wasn’t like trying to use the restroom on the Titanic while it sank. However, we overlooked the fact that as the party went on, some of our guests would be tilted at a considerable angle even before entering the toilet and that our effort to beautify the outside of it with some panels of trellising would seem to them like a cruel disguise. (Tip #8: Portable toilets are recognizable for a reason. Accept this.)

K— and I spent the afternoon circulating amongst guests who were chasing forkfuls of filet around their plates (thank God we didn’t serve peas!), brushing lint off their cake, hoarding beers as new and inadequate shipments arrived, or who had decided now would be a good time for a cleansing fast and were just listening to the band. As we did, two mysteries were cleared up.

The first was the unexpected rising of the guests during the ceremony. Remember the missing Bible? Unbeknownst to me, as I was waiting for my cue to enter the tent, the pastor and K— were having a hurried exchange about its exact location. K— did what came naturally to him in a sticky situation; he turned to his mother. In fact, he literally turned to her and gestured for her to come to the altar, thinking she could fetch the book. (I can just imagine what she was thinking: “NOW they want to chit-chat?”) In retrospect, calling on his mother to help was a pretty smart decision. It wouldn’t have looked seemly for him to walk away just then.

But the guests interpreted his motion as a sign to them, and they rose in unison just as I walked in. K—‘s Mom, however, knew her son. She went to the altar, where she, K— and the pastor decided on a course of action: she would find the Bible. The only problem was, she didn’t know where to look. So she decided to ask me. It was just inconvenient that at that moment I was engaged in walking up the aisle.

The second mystery is something I haven’t yet mentioned. K— and I took our vows according to the custom of repeating back to the gathered company the words the pastor fed us. I had noticed that each time one of us spoke, there was a loud rustling from behind us, as if all the guests were shifting in their seats. “What is going on back there?” I kept thinking. Well, it wasn’t my imagination. It seems that each and every time we opened our mouths, an airplane (we live near a small grass airfield) droned by overhead. So, the exchanges sounded something like this:
“I promise to…VRRRRRRRROOOOMMMMMMMM-M-M…’til death do us part.” The guests were shifting in their seats…trying to hear us! K— and I had become so accustomed to airplane noise, we didn’t even notice. But this does leave me wondering…since no one actually heard us take our vows, technically, are we married?

Whatever the answer, at least I can say I had a wedding day, and you’ve heard the main events. There are other tales to tell, but I can’t share them with you until the people involved die or move far, far away, and that brings me to my final tip: go for memorable, not perfect, because it won’t be perfect, so it might as well be memorable! Besides, memorable is a lot more fun.

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