connections
So, I went to Chris’s wedding. The service was pretty simple, and what you would expect in a wedding. The brother of the groom supplemented the recorded classical pieces by playing an acoustic and singing some praise songs in Italian. The message was your normal exhortation to the couple–which they probably were too excited to hear, but knew already.
The reception was fun, talking to people, good food–I didn’t feel like I had enough, so I ate several extra salads from empty seats, (can’t let food go to waste). They used dinging-the-glasses in the way that I was culturally used to–I explained it to the others at my table, (who were expecting an announcement) that it meant we wanted the bride and groom to kiss. There was also a tradition I had heard of, but not seen: the groom was “kidnapped” and held for ransom, the bride going around with a pair of pants, gathering donations. Eventually he was released, and the money was given to the couple.
Four voices and a guitar from the groom’s family added a nice interlude, although one speaker in a gym doesn’t bring out the beauty of closely harmonized voices very well. The normal wedding cake was supplemented with Torta Claudia, of which I was able to bring home a few extra pieces. I liked the crunchy fried bread suspended in the cake.
Afterwards I helped clean up, which made me feel useful, and then I went over to the hotel where the out-of-town friends and family were staying and watched the OSU/TX game(we lost). It was nice to just hang with people. Even though my only connection was that I went to school for a few months with some of them, and they knew my siblings, I still was a strand in the web of interlaced lives. Among the ten there were people who had grown up in Ecuador, Italy, Thailand and the US and I felt at home.
Now I will go to bed before I come down off the emotional high of feeling that I belong.
September 12th, 2005 at 7:18 pm
Nothing like an uplifting ending.