Wedding Bells and Shotgun Shells

Weddings are not my favorite things. In fact, I hate weddings. The whole deal, the cake, the dancing, the whole thing just bores me to tears. I haven’t always been this way though; there was a time I loved weddings. Let me explain, I was eight years old when I went to my first wedding. My grandmother has a picture of me during that wedding standing in front of a big banquet table wearing a giant pink cummerbund that will forever remind me just how awkward 90’s fashion was. In the picture, I’m smiling as hard as I can from ear to ear, so much so that to anyone who would enter my grandmother’s house it would be obvious that I was having the time of my life, that I just loved weddings.

However, what the uninformed visitor cannot to fully appreciate is that my smile, at that moment, was rooted in the awareness that the cameraman had just focused his camera on me because I was the only person at the wedding who was visibly having a good time. Directly behind the camera man was my frowning mother who seconds before hand leaned forward and whispered into my ear, “If I ever hear you utter even one of those words that just came out of you grandmother’s mouth, I’ll make sure your rear-end matches that cummerbund.”

You see, not long ago, before my family went and got all middle class and the Joneses and Perrys found the suburbs, our family gatherings used to be a lot more fun, so much so that the family that existed 17 years ago when that picture was taken no longer seems to exist anymore. My uncle’s wedding marks a kind of turning point in my family’s trajectory. Before then, the phrase, “enjoying the company of relatives,” meant trying to keep my 90-year-old great-grandmother from calling her soon-to-be in-laws, “a bunch of ghetto hoodlums, sons-a-bitches who’d never worked a day in their lives.” Back then, we’d all sit and pray her comments had gone unnoticed until somebody across the isle volleyed back with, “Shut the hell up you uppity old skank,” and shortly thereafter chaos ensued. For me, those days were the good old days, and everything that has come after them just doesn’t measure up. Since then, I’ve been to a lot of weddings, but nothing has lived up to that standard. I’m always longing for a time that can never be repeated.

In one month, I will be getting married. And though I don’t foresee many of the old Jones or Perry family antics taking place, (largely as a result of the fact that my great-grandmother is now dead), I kind of hate the fact that none of the drama of old will be there. Tiffany’s parents are great and I’m glad her mother will be spared the indignity of being called a “hussy whose trashy little daughter is stealing somebody’s baby,” but old habits die hard. Sure, it will be a great time. I am looking forward to hanging out with my friends, taking a week off, and lots of great food. But honestly, if we go the whole night and nobody throws a punch, it just won’t be the same.

If I get the girl, I can’t really complain. But if I could get the girl and a drunk, 90-year-old black woman to call the whole church a “bunch of assholes,” I’d actually be in heaven.