I’m going to a wedding today. Aside from my delight that this is the joining in matrimony of two lovely friends who met on their first day at hospice, I figure that weddings are traditionally a venue at which people besides the bride and groom find happiness. I mean, how many times have you asked a couple how they met and heard the answer at a wedding? Yeah. Me neither. Maybe it’s an urban legend.
Still, I’m feeling optimistic. Weddings are such cheery occasions and after going to see A Star is Born last night, at the end of a long week nursing the dying, I am well ready for some cheery.
I asked Ben, the groom (whose name I have changed to protect the innocent) if there were likely to be any single men in their 50s at his wedding. Preferably single men in their 50s who were not alcoholic, mentally ill, homeless, or addicted to banned substances. Any other criteria? Ben asked, looking concerned. Kind, funny, sweet? I said hopefully. Ben thought for a moment. No, he said.
I’m still going to his wedding. Maybe he doesn’t actually know all his guests? Maybe his fiancee invited people he has never met? Maybe some random sweet, funny, kind, single guy in his 50s will wander in off the street, not realizing this is a wedding he’s not invited to, and everyone will instantly love him so much he will be invited to stay? And he’ll ask me to dance?
Damn. Just remembered: I’m a really crap dancer. Still, there’s always champagne toasts. Plus champagne actually makes me a better dancer. Eventually.
It’s a long time since I went to a wedding. I can only dimly remember that the last one was an extremely painful affair. Not for the bride and groom, they seemed to really enjoy it. But for me: because everyone’s wedding is all about me, and because I had recently left my marriage. I mean my first marriage. (This was a long time ago, does nobody get married any more, or do they just not invite me?) Anyway, I was in that raw, dazed, stare-straight-ahead-to-avoid-crying phase of the breakup and yet I felt it would be churlish of me to turn down the kind invitation to my coworker’s wedding just because I myself was deep in the fog of divorce. I mean how long can a wedding be? I reasoned. The ceremony is usually less than an hour, and then there’s great food, wine, and dancing. I can do this!
Sadly, I had not taken into account that the bride and groom were Hindu and Jewish, respectively. Jewish weddings, I know, can go long. There’s all the glass smashing stuff and the chuppah and the walking round the groom seven hundred times. Hindu weddings I knew nothing about. But I learned about them that day. The principal thing to know about a Hindu wedding is that if you think a Jewish wedding goes long, you have clearly never been to a Hindu one.
The wedding was at a fancy yacht club in San Francisco. It was a stunning day in the city, right on the water there. About two hours into the wedding ceremony, the Jewish part was still going and my strength was beginning to fail. Deep into the third hour, when we switched over to the Hindu part and the bride and groom were promising through a weird sheet thing that they would love and honor one another for the rest of time, I went outside for some air. I stood there looking out over San Francisco Bay and all the fancy yachts and sobbing quietly. I really didn’t want anyone to see, in case they thought I was in love with the groom or something, but those sobs were coming from a deep place and they were hard to conceal.
Happily, the ceremony only took about another two hours and then there was the fun part, by which time I was so dehydrated from crying that all I could do was gulp quantities of water, which made me need to pee a lot. Like I said, a fun day for all.
This one’s going to be much better. My friends kindly left two years between the end of my marriage (the second one, count ‘em) and the start of theirs. I am an emotional amazonian woman now. If I cry (if, ha!) they will be tears of sympathetic joy. And even if I’m the only single person at the event (please, no) I will bravely dance alone. I may be fuelled with a flute or two of bubbly, but that’s because I have no aptitude for dance and am not really one of those folks who love to look ridiculous in a crowd.
As for my friends, I wish them a long and radiant life together. But if their wedding ceremony goes more than an hour, I’m going to have to ask them to just stop now and cut to the fun stuff.
How did it go?
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