Posted by So much crammed into one little weekend. Probably going to take a bit to unpack it all. This first post should be mostly about the wedding. Do want to get into some travelogue on my short visit to NYC (spoiler – I’m not ready for life in a city that big).
We arrived on Thursday after a very uneventful flight. As a reminder, my original plan was to just fly in on Friday and then leave on Sunday but she asked me to come to the rehearsal and rehearsal dinner even though I wasn’t part of the wedding so we came in on Thursday. Well, we get in and get a message from the Work Daughter that she’s running late and sending hubby to be to pick us up. Good thing I met him back in May so we at least knew what each other looked like.
I think they are a very good fit for each other. Both are a bit introverted and they are kind of nerds (and I mean that in a good way). From what I could see, neither one are really planners so things tended to run behind schedule and we’ll have more on that later.
So we are driving the rehearsal and he starts getting calls from various people. One is the Work Daughter checking up to see that he’s picked us up and to let him know she’s running late as well. It seems like everyone is running a bit late so I think we hit the church about 10 minutes after the scheduled time.
Turns out that the Work Daughter was basically right behind us because we parked and her car drove up and parked pretty close to ours. She sees me and comes tearing out of her car running up to give me a big hug. Then we go the reception where I get introduced to a boatload of people. I’m really bad with names. I’m much better with faces. But I managed to remember most of them.
The rehearsal runs a bit longer than expected. Her godmother is trying to run the show from the back of the church and trying to get everyone aligned. I’ve been in a couple of weddings and, as groomsmen, it is just our duty to not take things as seriously as we should during a rehearsal and that’s what his friends were doing. At one point, the godmother tells everyone to be quiet so they can all hear the instructions and so they could do a sound check on the WD and HTB (hubby to be) repeated their vows.
The HTB was a little uncomfortable with the parts where he had to speak and it didn’t help that people were yelling at him to speak up. It didn’t help that the WD had taken public speaking classes in High School so she was giving him grief as well and repeating her lines loudly and clearly. As I told my wife, it might be a little different during the real ceremony so she might want to tone it down a bit.
As we were waiting around to discuss who was going to dinner and making arrangements for people to get there, HTB was actually taking photos of the things he was supposed to repeat because he said he wanted to practice. He was driving us to the dinner so we took the opportunity to try and share some of our wisdom. That being (1) weddings rarely go perfectly, and (2) anything you do mess up just becomes something you laugh at down the road.
The dinner was at a very nice Italian restaurant and, since we were a large party, they just kept bringing us food. I met a few other people who weren’t at the rehearsal. More names and faces. To be honest, I was a little nervous about this dinner. It is tough sitting at a table when you really only know one person (well two) and they are the guests of honor. Conversations with strangers isn’t really my sort of thing. This is a bigger problem when most of the people are much younger than I am. (Three of the bridesmaids were either pre-teen or very early teen and two of them sat across from me)
But it turned out to be a fun night. I had this guy next to me who was a talker. In one of life’s little mysteries, he had just that day spent some time looking up a place he wanted to go and it happens to be a place I know pretty well. So we chatted about all kinds of things. Well he did a lot of chatting and I did a lot of listening and added in a few things where needed.
The WD had a little too much to drink and so she gave her keys to someone else and got a ride home with HTB. She had another friend drive us home. This guy was closer to our age and was her neighbor when she first moved to NJ. I think he got the job of surrogate father/friend/fix it guy because she really didn’t know anyone else when she settled in. And I’m glad she had someone there she could turn to and he really helped her through that first period. Turns out he was the one giving her away given that she’s kind of on the outs with both her biological parents. We talked a little bit on the drive home and he’s telling me how much she’s told him about me and how happy she is that I’m here. He’s a really nice guy and he will appear in the further adventures of the trip.
I’ve now made an executive decision that I need to split this into pieces since I’ve just covered the first night. So I’m changing the title to include Day 1 and we’ll pick up the story at a later date.
Facing Diagonal Wall 