Sunday, June 11, 2006

The Wedding Weekend

We (the family) have returned from a weekend wedding in Windsor Ontario. Windsor is interesting for a very few reasons:

1) It is one of the rare places where a Canadian goes north to enter the U.S.

2) It has a good deal of French heritage.

3)... there is no 3.

Windsor is a pretty dirty, heavily industrialized city. It produces a lot of motor vehicles. It has a casino. But it has no discernable charm.

To their credit, the people of Windsor to whom I spoke seem aware fo the situastion, and deal with it in a postive manner. Well, that may be putting it a bit strongly. Actually they seemed to accept it much in the same way that they do the shift work that goes with the auto plants.

The wedding itself was unusually short. I had gotten used to the notion of Catholic weddings being at least an hour with communion involved, but such was not the case.
Thw whole service was about 40 minutes, and that with the priest having to wing hs way through the ceremony a bit. He forgot the order for the service. Perhaps he was thrown off by the very prominent Italian (about 1/3 of the sevice was spoken in Italian). In the end, the service went off with only the one hitch that was supposed to happen.

The Church itse;f was not quite my moher's Catholic Church. Oh, the architecture was the same, and all that, the sam old over emphasis on Mary. But the prayer candles are no longe candles but electric lights. Insurance needs claim another victim.

The reception was very loud, very alcoholic and very fattening. The desert and fruit table belonged in an art gallery. The reception hall itself was almost as intersting for me, being called the Giovanni Caboto Club. That, if you know your Canadian history (or geogrpahy) is the Italian version of John Cabot, he of the famed trail in Nova Scotia. That I took the time to ponder this in no way means that I was uninterested in the other things going on around me which included:

1) My wife, decked out as a Bridesmaid, outdoing pretty well every other woman in the place.

2) The food, delicious and endless.

3) My kids, one of whom fell asleep while the other discovered his "inner boogie".

4) People who shook what their mamma gave them, blissfully unaware that mamma had taken it back about 15 years ago.

I don't belong in 4). Not because I refrained from dancing. I did dance. Not because momma never gave me anything to shake. She did. No, the reaosn I don't belong in 4) is simple: Momma never took back what she gave me. Rather it has become overgrown. And I am aware of it.

Thanks to you all for not laughing.

No comments: