The Wedding

The Sealing

  Part of the trip to Utah was going up to see the wedding of Skoticus, a friend from high school. We got to go early to the Sealing, which was great. The Provo Temple, and that area of Provo, are both gorgeous, and it was kind of nostalgic for Carrie and I to be there anyway, since we are both RMs and had last been to the Provo Temple as Missionaries-in-Training.

  Inside the temple, I was surprised to find that I remembered most of Scott’s family, even though the only people I’d ever had a meaningful interaction with was his father and younger brother, Andrew. Scott’s longtime roommate and best man, Logan, remembered me as well, and I was recognized by a couple of Skoticus’ other friends. I got to rib Scott about smirking when the sealer mentioned “multipl[ing] and replenish[ing] the earth”.

The sealer also had some really good advice. He said that even though wondering from time to time if you had married the right person was natural, that letting yourself dwell on those feelings could never be conducive to a good marriage or to your personal happiness, and that it was better to dismiss those thoughts as soon as they arose.

  In short, the sealing was beautiful, and I’m glad we went.

No, I did not take this picture. But it looked kind of like this at the time, except that it was raining.

A Three-Hour Gap

  We also had a few other little hitches with the 3 or so hour gap:

1. We were staying with my parents, who lived a good 2 1/2 hours from the Provo Temple, and we didn’t know anyone else in the area who would be home on a Friday in the middle of the day.

2. We discovered, during the gap, that Google Maps is not designed to handle the Utah grid system (thought this was frustrating, in hindsight it actually turned out to be a good thing: it took us nearly an hour and a couple of phone calls to find where the reception would be).

3. It was cold and rainy the day of the wedding, so walking the grounds around the Provo Temple or BYU, as we would have liked to do, was pretty much out.

  That being the case, Carrie had the good idea to call up the missionary couple who were at the Institute when Carrie and I were dating. After finding out our number for them didn’t work anymore, we had about three phone calls before we located Sister Iverson. Carrie also found out that Bro. Iverson had passed away that summer, so part of the gap was consolatory ice cream.

  As it turned out, Sister Iverson lived an hour and a half away; but it was on the way home so we got to visit her on the way back.

In short, waiting for the reception was kind of a bummer.

The Reception; or How (not) to Survive a Wedding

There are, in general, three generally accepted ways to survive a wedding reception:

1. In and Out: Come to the reception, say a brief hello to the bride and groom, load up on snacks, and get out.

2. Bring your own entertainment:  Convince someone you’d rather spend time with than the bride and groom’s extended family to come with you, and have a private party at someone else’s venue. Use slow parts in the conversation to do all the niceties, such as greeting the bride and groom, and talking to anyone else of importance to the wedding party you are acquainted with. Try not to let you and your entertainment’s antics get out of hand.

3. Workhorse: Be so intimately involved with the event that the entire length of the reception you are caught up in an unrelenting torrent of official greeting, posing for photos, last-minute decorating, table setting and clearing, etc, so that by the time it’s all over you wonder where the time went.

Being the bride or groom of course, is somewhat of a mix between #2 and #3.

  Not having seen Skoticus (far right) face-to face in something like 4 years, I was a little bit eager to catch up with the guy a little bit. This of course, leads to awkwardness and is not a good wedding survival plan.

We did at the very least, get pictures with the happy couple.

  We also had to stay for the whole thing because my older brother and his wife were coming, who I hadn’t seen in over a year, and my parents were coming with the children. They each characteristically arrived a half-hour late.

There were lots of fun things to do around the wedding reception:

1. There were 16 squirrels hidden around the house (no, not real squirrels, although I bet Scott would have thought that would have been more fun)

2. Part of the wedding photo book was to go up to the loft and make funny pictures with all kinds of props.

3. Cucumber Lemonade and Mint Lemonade. I was a fan.

However, we had arrived an hour and a half before the actual reception, early even for the ring ceremony. By this time, Scott’s old roommate, who I would have liked to hang out with, had previous engagements, as did most of his other friends; maybe they knew something we didn’t. I am claustrophobic when it comes to big formal social gatherings, and the fact that the reception was at a house made it an unusually small space for the number of people attending. So Carrie and I had about an hour of trying to find a quiet place to hang out and being asked how we were related after we had exhausted the party entertainment.

  I did get to talk a little bit with Scott’s younger brother Andrew; he has become quite talented in the 10 or so years I haven’t seen him. We was doing all the gourmet food himself, was finishing up a biology degree and wanted to go to law school to be a patent attorney. Talking with him was actually more amusing though, because personality-wise, he reminded me of no one so much as the wedding planner from Father of the Bride. Heh.

  So… yeah. We didn’t really do well on any of the wedding survival plans. It was still a lot of fun, but we were definately there for more of it than we needed to be.