THAT IS ONE ROCK STEADY MAN

Conventional wisdom says I was supposed to be a mass of blubbering emotionalism on Saturday at my daughter’s wedding.

I am anything but conventional.

Oh, there was pre-wedding hysteria right and left so I felt obligated to be the voice of calm reassurance and reason.  There had been an incredible amount of completely unnecessary drama during the planning of the event already.  I tried to be calm and supportive the whole time.  I did what I could.

Saturday morning was densely foggy but it cleared up into a beautiful bright sunshiny day.  Fridays’ storms had dumped 3 inches of water on the area and knocked over a great many trees.  So there was no choice but for Saturday to be as gorgeous as Friday was damaging.

Things started going wrong after I picked my wife up at the hairdresser’s.  We were walking back to the car when she stepped in a hole, tripped, and fell, severely skinning her knee and elbow.  Blood everywhere but her hair stayed up.  Fortunately the hairdresser had a first aid kit.

The wedding was at 3 and we got to my daughter’s apartment at 2:15.  She and her bridesmaids were getting ready all except for one noticeably missing.  At 2:20 she calls in total hysterics because her dress doesn’t fit her, shouldn’t get it to zip up at all.  It seems her mother altered it 2 days earlier but she hadn’t bothered to try it on.  Her boyfriend was providing the sound system for the bandshell and he was still at her house with her.  My daughter put up with her wailing as long as she could and told her that her freaking boyfriend had better get the bandshell right that minute.  He made it before the wedding started but the bridesmaid didn’t.  My daughter of course had a panic attack and started hyperventilating.

By then the temperature had soared into the high 80’s.  The city had refused to block off the street for us because a World War II re-enactment group was having a parade that started lining up right beside the bandshell at about 2:45.  Fortunately, it was an awful small parade and they were gone before 3.  The turnout of people seemed awfully light for the wedding but that may just have been because there is seating for several hundred and everybody was trying to sit in the shady areas.

Finally, the wedding started and still no one had a clue what the pastor was going to do.  Everything went the way we planned it.  I took the pictures of the girls coming down the aisle, then my carefully selected but uninformed assistant photographer took over.  I hightailed it to the back to walk my daughter down the aisle.  She was a nervous wreck, the missing bridesmaid had really got her upset.  So I went into damage control mode to keep reminding her to just breathe.  She was bawling by the time we got to platform.  I had to lead her to one side to avoid a puddle of water that refused to dry up.  Then I headed back to my camera because she wanted a picture just before the ceremony started.

That was when the idiot pastor pissed me off.

I had no idea what he was planning but he started shaking his head at me, pointed at a spot on the ground several feet away from my camera, and started wagging his finger in a clear “NO!” manner.  I dutifully moved back near my daughter as he started droning on about some standard marriage verses from the bible.  It seemed to take a very long time before he finally asked who gives this woman.  Clever fellow that I am, I knew the answer was her mother and I.  I asked my daughter beforehand if she wanted to do that because it’s old fashioned and traditional but not necessarily politically correct.  She was OK with it but we didn’t know for sure he was going to do it.  Then I went and sat with my wife and forgot about the pictures.

He used all the standard verses and admonitions but he seemed very scatterbrained and wandered all over the place.  He then asked if the bride and groom knew of any reason they shouldn’t go through with it.  My daughter replied, “No, we’re good.”  So then the vows and the rings which were both worded oddly (I think he forgot what he was saying.)  Then he momentarily forgot their names just before introducing them as man and wife.  Then he definitely forgot the obligatory, “You may kiss the bride.”  I was back at the camera as they headed back up the aisle.  My wife’s sister hollered out, “Go ahead and kiss her!”  So we got a great shot where everybody could see clearly.

I could have performed the ceremony much better.  But the retired (it’s easy to see why) pastor was an old World War II buddy of the groom’s grandfather and had performed the ceremony when his parents got married.  A symbolic gesture of good will, so to speak.

Then there was the congrats line as the temperature neared 90.  All of us men were in black.  We were all soaking wet by then.  But everybody was ecstatically happy.

Then we decided wedding party pictures on the beach were in order.  I had a small panic attack just as we got there when I realized I had left my camera bag with two other cameras and a very expensive lens at the bandshell.  It was fortunately still there.

We got some goofy shots that were an awful lot of fun.  There were hundreds of people down there but we used the sand dunes as a backdrop and also the lighthouse.  Some of the poses were hysterical.  One of the groomsmen, who really is quite a character, walked up to a very good looking girl in a very skimpy bikini and told her she was a very sexy lady.  The other guys had dared him.  The shore of Lake Michigan is a very cool place to be in the Summer.

There was another bridal party there at the same time.

By then we were getting some serious sunburn and it was time for the reception.  We all entered to the theme from Rocky.  There seemed to be a whole lot more people at the reception.  The food was generally good and the bartender was excellent.  I had a rum and coke that knocked me on my ass because of the overexposure to the sun.  It was perfectly mixed.  My daughter knows how to arrange a party.  The dancing started and I switched to video because it was really too dark for still photos.  Several women told me my dance with my daughter was so beautiful it brought them to tears.  I danced several slow dances with my wife (who had recovered fairly well from her fall.)  But the bridal party were dance maniacs.  I don’t ever remember having that much energy in my entire life.  They were having a blast and I was having a blast taping them.  This was literally the most fun party I have ever been to.

It is so nice to be a part of pure joy.

The guy who taped my daughter and my dance could be heard saying, “That is one rock steady man.”  Maybe he couldn’t see it but I have never been happier.  That was the most emotion I have felt in eleven years and it was all good.  Pure joy.

Euphoria.

This entry was posted on 23. June 2009 at 03:30 and is filed under humor, wild guesses, emotion, religion, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response or trackback from your own site.

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