Fortunatus S. Marchbanks' Quotidian Minutiae

T is definitely married.

Despite a series of clothing re-designs for the entire female half of the bridal party that left the wedding dress still un-hemmed until an hour before the ceremony, and despite a car breakdown that left me stranded in Columbus, Texas on Friday afternoon requiring L (who had car troubles of her own) to come retrieve me, and despite monsoon rains that poured down in the middle of the day, every day, and despite the groom and groomsmen all getting lost together gods-know-where and showing up half an hour late for the ceremony, and despite armies of mosquitoes that attacked anyone in the least mosquito-prone (M and me, for two), the wedding happened after all last Saturday week.

Let’s see what some of those “despites” actually looked like.

L and M went to Houston on Wednesday to finish all the dresses (L sewed the bride’s and all the bridesmaids’ dresses herself, plus the neckties for the groom and groomsmen) and it seemed that nothing she had previously put together would do.  I think the final count was two full re-designs and a series of on-the-fly changes.  Thursday morning, her car refused to start, but instead of calling AAA then and there, she put it all off, thinking I would tend to it when I arrived Friday.

That might have worked, if the pickup hadn’t decided to stop dead on the highway at the outskirts of Columbus at noon Friday, requiring a separate call to AAA and waiting two hours for them to send a wrecker from Katy, almost fifty miles away. (They don’t have any affiliate in Columbus, thank you.)  So L had to call AAA, get them to come out and sell her a new battery for the car—the old one had gone bad—then drive through a drenching rain from Houston to pick me up from the garage in Columbus, seventy miles each way.  This knocked out almost four hours of sewing time she badly needed, and made us late to the rehearsal.  Fortunately, so was almost everyone else.  The officiant and his party got turned around and drove twenty miles in the wrong direction before anyone realized anything was wrong.  We did, in the end, get to have a rehearsal, but T, in a concession to our car trouble and what it did to our cash reserve, unilaterally cancelled the rehearsal dinner.  Instead, M and I went to dinner with L’s family, who’d flown in from Maryland and Maine.

Saturday L unpacked her sewing machine in the hotel room and dove into more work.  I didn’t have anything I was supposed to do until the ceremony, so I squired L’s mother on a trip to the Museum of Fine Arts where we got to see a fine traveling exhibition of paintings belonging to one of the Guinness beer heirs.  This entertained L’s mother, who is an inveterate museum-goer, and kept me out of L’s way.  M went off with her cousins, who did whatever they did in the afternoon—besides, I know, helping L touch up her hair at one point.

By the time we had to leave to get to the place where the wedding was being held, a funky old monster of an Arts & Crafts house near the Montrose district, L had everything done save basting down half the hem on the bridal gown.  I, of course, had on my kilt which didn’t match anything anyone else was wearing (all kilts, no matter how loud the tartan, are officially recognized as neutral when it comes to matching bridal parties’ colors).  L disappeared upstairs with the dress, and guests started to arrive about an hour later.  I shamelessly begged a dose of Off! from one of the groom’s party, to try to keep from getting my legs chewed to bits.  (It didn’t work.)

Everyone had been asked to arrive by 6:30 for a 7:00 curtain, but nobody realized that we needed to delegate somebody to make sure the groom and groomsmen understood this too.  6:30 came and went, as did 7:00, and we still had nobody to stand at the preacher’s left hand.  Repeated phone calls to them kept getting answered with “oh, we’re almost there” and a continued lack of the groom’s party.  At last, at 7:30, the groom showed up with no particular explanation of where they’d been or what they’d been doing.  They were hurried into their places, and we finally launched the bridal procession, to the great relief of the bridesmaid who’d been acting as coordinator.

The ceremony itself took about as long as such ceremonies take.  T and Jimmy did not try to write their own vows, and the preacher (who seemed to be some sort of Low Baptist) misread and mispronounced his way through Archbishop Cranmer’s service but got to the end without actual catastrophe.  (If it had been merely a question of reading and not one of having the license to read, I would have done a lot better job of it.)  The reception was a sit-down catered barbecue dinner, which I think suited everyone, and somewhere or another in there the cakes got cut, and the bride and groom had their first dance—I was told there was supposed to be a bride-and-father dance too, but that never seemed to happen.  We stayed for the first bit of the dancing, but I was tired and so was L, so we went back to the hotel pretty soon.

Sunday we got L’s family all packed off to the airport, then came back upstairs and I let L and M sleep for most of the day while I read.  They finally woke up in time for supper, which we went to Katz’s for (you gotta go to Houston to go to Katz’s now, since Marc Katz got crossways of the IRS and the Comptroller in Austin).

Late Monday morning we drove back over to Columbus after the truck, which wasn’t ready, so we ate another barbecue lunch at one of the hundred Mikeska boys’ places, then picked up the truck (the problem was that (1) the fuel pump burned out and (2) the fuel line rusted through) and came home.  T and Jimmy won’t be going on a honeymoon for a while, and to be honest I don’t remember what it was they said they were going to do when they did go.