One Wedding and a Funeral

Life can certainly have it's ups and downs... and sometimes those two aspects can adjoin each other very intimately. Butt up, if you will.

Last Saturday, I went to a friend's wedding. Now here is the place that I mention how much I totally love weddings. Well, not so much the wedding themselves, although I do enjoy them to an extent. It's nice to just sit there and watch the ceremony go down, and sigh that little romantic sigh that everybody has inside them. Somewhere. Deep down. In their heart. Maybe next to the aorta or something?

But the cermony is only the prerequisite in progressing onward to the better part of the wedding... the reception! Oh, how I loves me the reception. Ok, ok, I'll admit that I am a little partial to the reception because of the open bar. Your wedding reception does not have an open bar you say? Well, that's a bad idea. Your wedding reception is going to be a dry one? What the... are you a Quaker? Anyway, there are two things every wedding reception should have. 1) An open bar 2) Ummm, there's got to be a second thing.... cake? music? bridemaids? Whatever, pick one that you prefer.

So there I am enjoying the open bar with many, many other friends who are at this particularly fun reception. I do also recommend getting a hotel room as well. Then all the fun is safe fun, and safe fun is the funnest fun to have (The More You Know!) Our fun bunch of lushes got a hotel room, and also had an after party. That's the second thing! An after party. Do that, too!

So I woke up in the hotel room the next morning after having passed out the night before. I went to my cell phone, and had a message that I knew the answer to already. My grandmother had died. Here's the down part of this entire post. My grandma had been sick for a while, and I can be thankful that I was able to spend a bunch of time with her this past summer, and also know that ultimately she was happy and ready.

It's never easy to lose any family member, but you would not have believed the amount of people that came to her funeral. My grandma had lived in the same house and neighborhood in Traverse City for 31 years. Basically, she was a fixture of that neighborhood. The viewing and funeral were like a block party. Everyone who ever lived, and still lives, in that neighborhood was there. For crying out loud, her bagboy of 18 years from the market down the street, where she walked to and went shopping almost every day, was there. And I use the term bagboy very loosely. Truthfully he was more of a bagman, because anybody who has been a bagboy for 18 years definitely deserves the upgrade.

In general, my grandma would have approved, because there wasn't a great sadness in the air, but more of an acceptance peppered with good memories. And there were a ton of flowers. Seriously, 2000 pounds! We even offered many of them to her neighbors. In fact, I went across the street and got trapped in a very Zen experience of talking to an elderly couple who I couldn't really understand for about 30 minutes. The man had a mumbly, country type of speech pattern that seemed more cliche than actual words, and his wife was very composed and quiet and repetitive. That is until she started rocking out with some ragtime hits on the piano, for what reason... no one can tell. The living room was also home to approximately 350 dolls.

All in all, from start to finish, wedding to funeral, that was a great big chunk of life. I mean, there are merry-go-rounds and there are roller coasters, and most people prefer the roller coasters. Now I'm going to smack myself for making an allusion to the elderly lady from Parenthood.