| esquire within | - Wedding Week: Day I

2009.08.30

Wedding Week: Day I

Well, we did it.

In front of 165 friends and family, we said our vows and signed the dotted line. Of course, the actual ceremony was only 25 minutes out of five days of parties, dinners, brunches, scavenger hunts, booze cruises, caravanning and rubbing elbows with (almost) all of our favorite people conveniently gathered within the same three-mile radius, so it's going to take me a bit to get to it.

It all started on Thursday.

Actually, scratch that. It all started on Wednesday, when the Mother & Co. pulled into the Girl’s – the Wife’s!? – parents’ driveway in Amherst after the 21-hour drive from Iowa. (Actually actually, it really all started the weekend prior, when the then-Girl now-Wife trekked out to the Cape for some downtime with the bridesmaids, but whatever.) We had driven out from Boston the day before to wrap up last-minute details and, honestly, to decide that some things needed to fall off the Wedding Wagon (like the welcome baskets we were going to put in each hotel room) if some scrap of sanity was to be preserved.

I think my brother had been in town fifteen minutes before he started asking about golf courses in the area. This is approximately fourteen minutes longer than I thought he’d last, and almost eleven minutes longer than it took him to turn the conversation to the color and consistency of recent household poops. Thus, shortly after their arrival he and my uncle hit the links, the rest of the crew hit the hotel, and the then-Girl now-Wife and I got back to business. Which is to say, she curled up in the fetal position and practiced breathing exercises while I gingerly sipped my fourth large soy mocha (from Rao’s) and designed the reception menu and wedding program (see below -- no, really, see below -- I am ridiculously proud of these).

A few hours later they were all back on the deck while my Impending In-Laws served up what anyone else would call an Elaborate Banquet but they advertised as a Light Supper.

And then I got back in the car, hit the turnpike, drove the 90 miles back to Boston so I could finish cleaning our soon-to-be under siege apartment and pick up Jake, a groomsmen, and his wife Casey from the airport (whose flight landed just after midnight).

I finished the menus and programs somewhere around two o’clock in the morning, crashed shortly thereafter in the middle of our new, massive king-size bed (how do I love thee, let me count the ways…), and woke up at 8:00 to grab breakfast with Jake and Casey before dropping them off at the start of their exceedingly touristy stroll down the Freedom Trail.

From Faneuil Hall I hit Barmakian Brothers – one of the Armenian jewelers downtown – picked up the then-Girl’s now-Wife’s wedding band and, having left them with roughly 90% of the contents of my beleaguered checking account, high-tailed it back to my apartment so I could start preparing for the evening’s promised bachelor debaucheries.

That was the first exhausting 24 hours, and technically we hadn't even gotten started yet.

Posted by Derek at 04:39 PM in circadian | Permalink