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Back from a weekend in Ithaca with the old college crowd. I'm fighting off the upper respiratory bug my students gave me, and now that I'm home, I'm generally feeling pretty plaguey. The weekend was delightful, though.
I've been to a lot of weddings, but this was the first time I'd been to the wedding of a person I used to date. Back in the Early Cretaceous Period, when we were undergrads and dinosaurs roamed the earth, J and I set out to be friends who occasionally fell into bed together, but instead we accidentally built a relationship of depth and substance. Oops. We had two very excellent years, one very odd year, and a messy ending for which, to my great astonishment, everyone seems to have forgiven me. We were starting to figure out that we didn't want to spend the rest of our lives as a couple, but couldn't figure out how to break up, because we'd become best friends. By the end of the Late Cretaceous Period, Gondwanaland separated into the continents we know today.
Fifteen years later, I got to meet the person J was always meant to spend his life with. She's glorious. He's happier than I've ever seen him. Everyone is very pleased. Our long friendship has brought many gifts into my life, but one of the finest of these was seeing the faces of the bride and groom as they said their vows.
A marriage is a world, that's the thing. A wedding can open up that world a little, can make the guests welcome in the cosmos the couple's love has given rise to. J and E have a brilliant sense of ritual--they threw open their world to us, and there was room in it for the old relatives feigning curmudgeonliness, for the Dungeons & Dragons gang of the groom's youth, for the bride's numerous gay friends from her years in musical theater, for this ex-girlfriend and her husband. We were all glad to be there.
And now I'm glad to be home.
I've been to a lot of weddings, but this was the first time I'd been to the wedding of a person I used to date. Back in the Early Cretaceous Period, when we were undergrads and dinosaurs roamed the earth, J and I set out to be friends who occasionally fell into bed together, but instead we accidentally built a relationship of depth and substance. Oops. We had two very excellent years, one very odd year, and a messy ending for which, to my great astonishment, everyone seems to have forgiven me. We were starting to figure out that we didn't want to spend the rest of our lives as a couple, but couldn't figure out how to break up, because we'd become best friends. By the end of the Late Cretaceous Period, Gondwanaland separated into the continents we know today.
Fifteen years later, I got to meet the person J was always meant to spend his life with. She's glorious. He's happier than I've ever seen him. Everyone is very pleased. Our long friendship has brought many gifts into my life, but one of the finest of these was seeing the faces of the bride and groom as they said their vows.
A marriage is a world, that's the thing. A wedding can open up that world a little, can make the guests welcome in the cosmos the couple's love has given rise to. J and E have a brilliant sense of ritual--they threw open their world to us, and there was room in it for the old relatives feigning curmudgeonliness, for the Dungeons & Dragons gang of the groom's youth, for the bride's numerous gay friends from her years in musical theater, for this ex-girlfriend and her husband. We were all glad to be there.
And now I'm glad to be home.
