Love, love, love

I am a girl who likes a good time. I like to be surrounded by people I love, I like to make new friends with people I may grow to love, I like to laugh a lot, I like to dance, I like to be happy. I am fairly obsessed with this kind of fun, and am very lucky to have experienced it twice in the past few months. Most recently I got to be eight years old again, except with an over-21 pass, at a very fantastical camp wedding. This lost weekend encompassed all of the above, and more, and it feeds me even as it fades into the not-so-distant past.

It begins, as all great love stories do, with the happy couple. The groom is one of my oldest and dearest friends in an unstereotypical big brother type way. He has never not known how to cheer me up and make me laugh and keep me safe and he has put up with my craziness for years and loves me anyway in spite of it, even when I don't call and I don't write and I don't visit and I suck in the good friend category in actuality he is de trop for me. He makes me so happy just by his essence, and has for almost 20 years. His bride I met a cool 15 years hence when embarking on a cross-country trek by way of the northern climes. Even being a stupid and self-absorbed child I knew this chick was some kind of awesome for my friend. We stayed at her house courtesy of her and her awesome mom for a few days, picked up the rest of our wagon train, and bid her goodbye as we motored out west. I had good occasion to spend times here and there with her in the ensuing decade-plus and have always been in awe of her beauty, her brains, her moxie, her inherent loveliness.

As a couple these guys weathered many years and many states and many distances. I daresay they weathered perfect storms along the way and in the end triumphant they invited their nearest and dearest of now and then to witness the making-it-official beginning of a life legally entwined--making it clear to the world at large what those of us who have loved them have known these many years.

The weekend was a dream. For a bit it was a scary dream, but in the end the waking up was the hardest part. Six hours from home we found ourselves in a grown-up playground full of food and sport and booze and most importantly a few generations of amazing people. Acquaintances were made, old friendships deepened, new ones formed. The jokes served up at weddings since time immemorial never seemed fresher or funnier as we ate and laughed and played and danced our way through three days of good times.

As aforementioned, I love a good time. It seems to me that I have a lot of them but not nearly enough of them. And for me, good wedding is probably the best good time going. It is utter joy for me to be an honored guest in a room or a tent or a church or God's temples and serve as witness to two people I love standing hand in hand, ready to take on the world together and not apart, is probably the closest I get to a taste of heaven on earth. In certain instances I love everyone so much and so hard it leaves me breathless. We can't all be in the same moments in the same time zones forever but goddamnit we ought to enjoy it when we are., so hells bells I do.

I have felt this way at every wedding I have ever been a part of since childhood. Being related to people unwillingly by blood or willingly by soul makes little difference when these magic moments occur. At family weddings I tend to come thisclose to bursting into serious tears because there is always one moment where I am so filled with joy to be with the family that for better or worse I have 84,000 memories with and share genetic makeup with despite our myriad differences. And it always made me a little sad and lonesome that this distilled joy wasn't how it always was or would be. (That's my Irish.) My friends' weddings have all overflowed me with sheer delight at the commitment being made between two mates right in front of all our eyes. For a girl who has been always incredibly loyal to my people I am a commitment-phobe in a big way so it startles me every time that I will, unbidden, feel like the curtain is about to go up--the only other time I ever have this bursting, blooming, waterfall of emotion that is the gift the gods bestow to balance out the bloodcurdling, blackened blows I get in my darkest hours.

A good wedding is the greatest work of art, an incomparable piece of theater, a creation of something at once real and imagined. It is serious. Vows are made, bargains struck, love brims up and overflows an iron chalice. Creation happens and no matter what happens from that day forward, they can't take that away from any of us. Something tremendous has happened.

Mazel tov and salud and slainte my dear friends, and thank you for the privilege of knowing you separately and together.