Oregon Trail, part 4

What on earth does someone do on the day of their wedding? I would probably sit in the woods all morning drinking water and spitting it back out, afraid to ingest anything lest I throw it back up. I see cousin David on Saturday morning and he seems chipper, which means he's probably crazy. He's been wearing earings every time I've seen him, which still confuses me. Don't criticize, don't criticize...

Most of the able-bodied members on our side of the family go on a hike for a few hours about a hundred feet above the river. Nathaniel almost died on this trail, supposedly, when he was about five years old, but I think this story's been trumped up because it sounds like he just slipped near the side of a cliff. It actually is a moderately tricky trail with steep dropoffs that a child could zoom off easily if he or she weren't paying attention. Seven year-old cousin Caroline is unfazed, and for the entire three hour trek, she leads the way and even tailgates some old people into letting us all pass. Her dad, uncle Stephen, uses his GPS to locate geocaches, which are containers filled with logbooks and random trinkets placed by other people with coordinates and instructions on how to find them listed on the internet. He always carries a bunch of smalls around with him in case he finds a geocache because one of the traditions is to switch out the object found inside with one of your own.

That aftenoon was the wedding. David has a Chinese Catholic mother and Jewish father, and Cnythia is Italian but, for some reason, not Catholic, so it was someone's great idea to make the ceremony a confusing amalgam of all their traditions. I don't think you should be allowed to do that. You have to go one way or the other with the traditions and stick with it or the whole exercise seems trite. One thing I didn't know going into the ceremony was that the glass-breaking at the end is not just a Jewish tradition but also an Italian one, and the number of pieces the glass shatters into signifies the number of happy years of marriage to follow. When David steps on the glass at the end I hear a single plink as it snaps in two. I was never really that optimistic.

The reception is more awkward than I thought it would be. Even though Matt has a law degree and I am a college graduate, we get sat at the kids table with the most sullen cousins of the bunch. This puts me in the position of being the most social person at the table which is not my preferred niche. I feel like crawling in a hole and dying for some reason, but having free wine seemed like the next best thing. Over the next hour or so, I must've been making funny faces or something because my aunt kept taking pictures of me and laughing, and a kid from the other family kept running by and sniping photos as well. I don't think I was that drunk...

While much of our family's youth is emotionally distant, the sister of the bride, cousin Nicole, is outgoing and cheerful and gets me onto the dancefloor for a song. When I get back, Matt thanks me for keeping Nicole from asking him. What a party pooper thing to say. I've never seen him dance before. If he'd only had half as much wine as I had, maybe he'd leave himself for once. He needs to take a cue from little cousins Caroline and Kira, who have been holding hands, spinning, and twirling eachother for about two days straight (even when there's no music). Who spiked their juiceboxes?

The most bizarre moment of the weekend, bar none, was when Aunt Rosie stood up to give a toast to her newly-married son. It was rambling and surreal. She didn't mention anything remotely relevant to the moment at hand but instead gave a speech about her family's proud values, which are Freedom, Decency, and Inventiveness according to her. As tumbleweeds rolled by, she then rambled about how these virtues manifest themselves in each of her siblings. Uncle Arthur travels the world and cleans the environment, Aunt Bobbi prosecutes exclusively murderers and child rapists (...), and my mom is on the Dartmouth admissions committee and contributes regularly to NPR. Not only are these things on the complete other side of the planet from relevance, but they are also so warped as to be completely untrue. Aunt Renée was in stitches by our table while Matt and I kept looking at eachother thinking, "Is this really happening?" Mercifully, David snatched the microphone away from his mom before she could get to Becky or Renée, but the damage was done in my mind. Aunt Rosie is a lunatic the likes of which scholars will pore over for generations.