Bingo

It was a three o’clock ceremony at Twin Oaks. Two hundred people, maybe more. When Joe walked out with Francis, El Oso, Thunderbird, Wally, and Magnus, I should have expected the Joe-gusher when Jaya floated down the aisle. But he pulled it together just fine. And then we had another sister.

Two hours later Beaumont was lit with candles and white twinkly lights, rain speckled skies, so light you hardly noticed it, shading into more rainless gray and a buffet of Super Smokers.

Of course half the family missed the arrival of the wedding party. Carrie and Cherry manned Irish in the basement, losing her lunch over an allergic reaction to Advil. Uncle Mo and Lucia fixed Linus who had somehow spread flower pollen all over his shirt. But what’s a wedding without a little trauma somewhere?

Anyway, Irish and Linus recovered fast enough to rejoin the lines for dinner. Ricky tried to make Rose dance. Boy talked about bombs with Carrie. El Oso – the resident Hasidic Jew of the wedding party, he was told – emceed between tunes from the white-haired jazz band, same group of gentlemen from our own 2004 wedding.

Puck, the guestbook assistant attendant rewarded with Skittles for his part in the production, had commandeered the ten years and younger crowd outdoors near the woods, making himself hoarse over shouting orders. By the time he ran back inside to inform me on progress in his “stick workshop,” his suit pants, purple shirt, and vest were sweat-soaked. I had seen him earlier running through the screened-porch with a bag of popcorn and a glass of punch, yelling:

“THIS IS THE BEST DAY OF MY LIFE!”

Probably Joe’s too, but not because of the popcorn.

Anyway, after the dances, for which Joe, Jaya, and the parents had been taking lessons for months and all the usual wedding things, including Francis nose-diving for the garter, then strapping it over his head as an eye patch, at Ricky’s suggestion … bubbles sent the happy couple to the Miata. And of course a screeching burn-out.

So, we stayed for an hour with about twenty people or more to clean everything for the Boy Scouts. Not like they cared or anything. Then Rose and Ricky met Annamaria and Thunderbird at Applebee’s, Francis met Zuni to celebrate her graduation, the girls went to Vanbuskirk’s, and I went home.

Success.