Actually, it wasn't all that strange as far as weddings go, but this particular day was one of those that resonated with half-forgotten memories and fantasies of what could have been. I don't know how many of you have attended the wedding of your first ever boy/girlfriend, but if you have I hope it wasn't such a big deal. Big deals tend to steal your sleep and turn your waking hours into a hazy miasma where past merges with present, fantasy merges with reality, and everything sounds like it's taking place in a traffic jam. But big deals do have an early warning systme built into them. The first true warning comes in heavy traffic, when you nudge the car in front of you, then bang your fist on the horn convinced that the guy in front has rolled backward into your front fender. If you're lucky, the traffic rolls forward again so the big hariy guy who owns the car in front doesn't get the chance to get out and express his disappointment...
Back to the wedding. The girl in question had been my first intense love at the tender age of 15. We lasted a year, in which time we managed to wind up each other's limbic systems tightly enough to catapult an adult rhino into orbit. It was not a year of release. The steady unwinding took place over the subsequent 15 years. There were times when, if circumstances had been different, we could have built a more mature catapult together and sent each other flying to great heights, but it just never quite came about, not least because I'm a wandering soul and haven't really been in one place long enough for anyone to get a leash around so much as a stray ankle.
Anyway, I showed up at the church, and did a reading, you know, the classic one about clashing cymbals and banging drums, and went through the whole thing in a daze. Why? The bride. She was gorgeous. Talk about getting everything right. According to one of her close friends and colleagues she'd been eating nothing but lettuce for 6 months and had shrunk down to the size of a 10-year-old. Her dress was classy, simple, revealing - my jaw is dropping just thinking about it.
At the reception I sat at a table next to a charming New Zealander who used the duration of the meal to try and get me to publish her poems. Afterwards there was live jazz, dancing and mayhem. After the meal, I changed out of my dress-shirt in favour of gettng down and dirty in a long-armed (and rather sexy) T-shirt. I put my my dress-shirt in a plastic bag and deposited it in a room that the reception's receptionist assured me was secure as it was full of the happy couple's wedding gifts. I plonked my bag between an enormous candlestick and a toaster and rejoined the party. Somewhere in the middle of it all, the happy couple sneaked away - with my shirt! Somehow they thought my sweat-stained, minging rag was a wedding present of profound sensibility. At any rate, I haven't seen it since.
Life goes on, and the drama of one day, a day that evokes whole other alternative existences, becomes swallowed and digested, and other big deals muscle in on the every-day-dose to steal sleep and put dents in the fenders of fellow motorists.
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