In this great Institute, a room was filled with early 20th-Century masters and 30 kinds of cookies, and people I've known for years got very drunk.
I first met Russ in middle school, and from small seeds our friendship grew…particularly after he wrote a paper about me for Mrs. Nord's class in 8th grade. I also like to think he spotted an easy target: I stopped counting how much money I lost to him over the years in NCAA brackets and otherwise, and how many arguments we had concerning capitalism v. socialism. This was more than compensated for by his being a great organizer for sports-watching parties, a fantastic conversationalist, and a really conscientious man with a sense of humor as dry as a good bottle of red wine.
I first met Robyn in high school. She was the exact opposite of Russ: petite, quiet, giggly, and with a pair of brown eyes so wide you could quite easily get lost in them. But as anybody who knows her well could tell you, underneath the feminine exterior is an iron will and a mammoth, solid gold heart. In four years of Honors English I came to admire and care about her very much, and still remember her playing all the female characters in The Great Gatsby for a senior project, and how she beat me in the 2002 Oscar Pool under my own tiebreaker rules.
Because by then she and Russ were together. The story as I heard it was that she liked him, he was resistant, and our mutual friends talked him into it. By some quirk of nature I kept in touch with them both over the years as they finished high school together, finished college together, are now in the process of getting their Ph. D.s together (mathematics for him, philosophy for her), and, on Saturday, became husband and wife.
And as I watched them exchange vows and rings at Our Lady of Mount Carmel, a great solemnity mixed with my welling eyes. For years, until I met the S.O., I had a nervous capacity to sabotage potential relationships by thinking too much of the ramifications: what if she says no and I ruin the friendship? What if we're together a long time and break up? What if we get married? Because I wanted, and still want more than anything, to be a husband and father like Daddy someday. What I know now is that relationships are a happening…they move as they are supposed to move and develop naturally. You can't force it, you can't predict what will come next. You just have to enjoy the good and be strong and pure of heart in the bad. Now I don't worry about ramifications. I'm over the moon with the S.O., and we might be together for a long time or be hating each other's guts next month (GOD DON'T LET THIS BE TRUE). I don't think about that. I think about being happy right now, and that's what matters.
For my dear, dear friends, however, the time had come. And I would wager everything this marriage will end, as Chris Onstad sagely wrote, with one of them in the room watching the other die…both full of peace and contentment and love, love, love…the love I could feel at breakfast that morning when Russ told me about his nerves, and could see in Robyn's eyes during the ceremony.
The reception, by the way, was at the Butler Institute of American Art, and I drank whiskey and wine in the galleries where so many field trips instructed me to revere Sargent and Homer, and a gluttonous Antone's meal was topped off by 30 types of cookies, a thousand-dollar wedding cake (I had one and a half slices, and they were great), and a whole lot of dancing where people I never expected to see get drunk got drunk…and some old high school friends made me realize how good my life still is despite it all…and an usher looked like Alan Rickman…and we did the Electric Slide.
To Mr. Waller and Mrs. Repko-Waller…may your days be filled with a love supreme.
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