Not Just Another Day

Lovely, sweet and thoughtful. These are the kinds of things people say about showers. But nobody warned me that the horizon would tip thirty degrees and the contents of our lives slide into one corner. To everyone else, it's lovely. To us, we're overwhelmed by - well - all we could come up with yesterday was "weird."

Over pasta, of all things, the people you dance with meet the people you've known since high school and the people from work meet the people who gave you life and birth. And they are uniformly delighted and curious about one another. All their good wishes are aimed at you. All their curiosity is aimed at uncovering a bit of you in the lives of the other people you love.

Somewhere between the speechlessness and the nervous darting of the eyes and the sudden realization that you have no idea where you fiancee has gotten to, it dawns on you: This wedding has the power to draw all the matter of life into one place. that queasy feeling is the shock of all the little slices of yourself that you shaved off and spread around to these two or those four come together with a clap.

All you can do is stand still and try to take it in, like powerful black hole that is drawing light from everywhere within range. And the best they can do is call it a shower! We'll be lucky if we don't explode on the wedding day.