Wedding Review.6

My commute was once again monomythic. First a train, then a ferry out across the bay, which was clotted with Fleet Week sailboats. Overhead, the Blue Angels, those bullying otherworldly visitors, flew in formation, smoke rings and insurance ads drifting in their wake. Once back on land, I climbed a mountain, relieved to be overwhelmed by trees, the earth finally soft and dark. A group of teens drank beer and watched the planes make swathes across the clear, deep sky of the bay. On the other side of the mountain, I crossed a meadowed valley. I stopped to take a leak, was approached by a deer that almost seemed like a man. This was the sort of peace that was ripe for hyperbolic mosquitoes: the Blue Angels had followed me across the bay.

The wedding party was assembled in the grass and seemed to be taking it all in stride. The lack of craning necks was refreshing. Of course, they seemed to be thinking, the planes grandstanding just above. This was fated. This was their Something Blue.

There’s the bride, someone said, and I turned to see a woman in an ill-fitting pink floral dress. Is it possible, I wondered, could there ever be a bride this brazenly un-vain and impure? The answer was no: this woman was the groom’s twin sister. The bride, despite being pregnant, wore her dutiful white with vigor.

Toward the end of the evening, my voyage caught up with me: my knee gave out. Stairs became epic, carrying buckets and bus tubs now a Promethean task. Many of the guests, I thought, had traveled much farther than I. Under less rigorous circumstances, granted, but still, I understood that nagging, not-drunk-enough doubt: the instant where the event of a lifetime becomes an afterthought. This is why we must work so hard to make memories.

Due to a lack of hard alcohol, the guests all left in a timely, ordered manner.

I went home with two small bunches of parsley.