The Wedding of Sara to Tom

Wherein a girl who still seems to me 16 is wed, and cousins are met with song and drink
Part II of V

I’ve always been really good with little kids. When I was a teenager, my little cousin Sara and I would be attached at the hip at family events. But when I went off to college, I didn’t see so much of her, and then she went and got about the business of growing-upness.

(The first family event I missed while at college, she thought my cousin Jenny was me.)


This weekend, Sara, who is now 26 and entirely unknown to me on any real level beyond that chubby-cheeked, dimpled, blue-eyed hip-cherub of yore, got married to her high-school sweetheart, Tom. It was nice, a very basic Catholic wedding, with her four sisters, Jill, Erin, Katie and Megan, among the attendants. Her brother, Josh, also ushered and played guitar.

The best thing was, of course, spending time with my family.

These goombas.

And I realized this weekend that that has gotten loads better again after a few years of my feeling completely unmoored and alone among this very large group of relations. Especially awesome was that my cousin Bob came with his wife, Vicki. I’ve thought very highly of Bob since he married her, see. (Always did, of course, ha ha! HI BOB, XOXO) So yay, I got to spend a lot of time with them and the other cousins/cousins-in-law in attendance.

Some cousins couldn’t make it to the wedding, due to their own babies having been born mere days or a couple of months beforehand, having to move to Dallas, etc. And this was an adults-only reception (no strippers, though), so some spouses had to stay home with the kids. (Did you know how hard it is to get baby sitters on the 4th of July? Apparently somewhere in the realm of VERY VERY VERY HARD.)

At the reception, my cousin Marc kept trying to get me drunk. (When I told his wife this the next day, she wasn’t surprised, not even a little bit.) I hadn’t seen him for an hour, for instance, when he found me in the line for stir fry, a Labatt’s in one hand and my second gin & tonic in the other. “It’ll be near Aunt Pam,” he said as he went off with the drinks. Lucky for me the bartenders seemed to be making things pretty weak; I normally would never have been able to drink two and a half.

Late night for Cree! I got a ride with my Aunt Margaret and Marc, her son the drink-presenter. I think we left at — ! — 11:30. I had to wash my hair when I got home because it reeked of someone’s perfume.

I suspect Barb.

we continue with part III below