This was written just after my wedding on September 8th, 2002
The wedding is over. I’m now a married man. Do I feel different? A little bit, maybe. Karina doesn’t feel any different, but she also says that it hasn’t hit her yet that she is actually married and not going home to Texas at the end of the week.
Everybody wants to know how the wedding went. I could have written pages and pages of prose describing in great detail both the wedding and the reception if I had sat down to do this five or six days ago when everything was still fresh in my mind. As it happens, my memory has become slightly fuzzy in the eight days since it all happened. Still, I’m going to try and put forth the events of the day. I’m just not going to call it prose.
I can’t remember how much sleep I got the night before. Karina and I had been working on last minute details, like the translation of the mass from Spanish into English for the wedding program, but we had both been averaging about three hours a night for two weeks straight. Partly from nerves, mostly from trying to get stuff done. Karina was up well before me. Her mom and her left for the room at the hotel where the reception was so she could start getting ready. It takes the bride considerably longer than the groom to get ready for a wedding.
When I got up I went back to work on the wedding programs. There wasn’t much left to do, mostly just printing them and folding them. We wanted to staple the pages together for each one, but that idea didn’t pan out very well. Printing them turned out to take a long time on Karina’s brother’s printer.
Once the programs started printing I called my groomsmen to find out how their morning was going and when they would be able to pick me up and take me to the reception hotel so I could start getting ready. I got ahold of one of the groomsmen who said he would get everybody else up. One of my Best Men, Mike, who didn’t go out and party with everybody else, called me to see what was going on. I ate two breakfast tacos and forgot about the third one. I would pay for that later. I went back to my printing.
As each set finished printing I put them in order and folded them. At this point, I began to notice some of the errors on the pages, but it was too late. We had long since run out of time to make corrections to these things. A decision was made to only give them out to the few people at the wedding who didn’t speak Spanish. I should have kept one for myself.
Noon. I call my groomsmen again to find out where they are. They were still at the hotel room, on South Padre Island, half an hour away from me. And they were not ready yet. In fact, they were just getting up. I spoke to one of my other Best Man, Bob, who informed me that everybody had to shower and then they would be on their way to pick me up.
With the extra time I went back to print more programs. I actually used up all of the paper we had bought before anybody showed up for me. I was pissed. My wedding was at 5pm, it was already 2pm, and nobody had shown up for me yet. At 2:30, a scant two-and-a-half hours before the wedding, my groomsmen, the people I was relying on for this day, finally sauntered over to pick me up.
At that moment in time I understood with perfect clarity why there is a seven day waiting period on handgun purchases in the US. Seven days is almost enough time to calm down from something like that. You would think that your best friends, Best Men, Groomsmen, and people who had travelled 1,500 miles to come to your wedding would understand and take seriously the most important day of your life.
You do not expect them to party until all hours of the night before and then spend half of your most important day sleeping away their hangovers. When they left for the island the night before I didn’t think I needed to tell them to stay modestly sober and get up early. I would say I’ll know better next time, but I don’t plan to have a next time.
The second they showed up I let them have it. I’m not sure what I looked like but people were afraid to get within arms reach of me and several people later expressed a fear of riding in the same car.
We finally got to the reception hall and rented a room (Karina was getting ready in the suite we had rented for that night) at about 3pm. Two hours to go. While hanging up my tux and getting ready to take a shower, my friend Sean, one of the two that flew over from the Bahamas to be at my wedding, came up to me to tell me what a great time he had the night before with all of my friends from Texas. I guess he missed the part where I was livid about that. After I explained my dissatisfaction, nobody wanted to be near me anymore.
The room was unbearably hot. The air conditioner wasn’t working properly. After a nice hot shower I put on my tuxedo: undershirt, shirt, tie, vest, and jacket. I then proceeded to start sweating profusely from every pore on my body. A few minutes later I had to abandon that room in favor of the suite my brother had rented, also at the same hotel.
Ahh. Blessed air conditioning. I stood next to the air conditioner for the next few minutes while everybody finished getting ready. Then it was time. I climbed into the car with my brother, his family, and my mom, and we were off to the church. For the entire week people had been asking me if I was nervous and I never was. I still didn’t feel nervous but I was about to realize I hadn’t eaten anything in the last 16 hours except for two breakfast tacos.
We got to the church, parked, and walked inside. There were only about ten people there already. It was very warm. We were wondering if the church was going to have air conditioning or not and for a few minutes it looked like we were out of luck. Then, about fifteen minutes before the ceremony was set to begin, somebody turned the a/c on.
I think they only reason they turned it on was to cool me down for the bad news they were about to tell me. All week I knew it was going to happen but I held out hope that on this one day things would go our way. What was the bad news? The bilingual priest wasn’t going to be performing the ceremony. Instead, the entire thing would be done in Spanish. They found a book that had the ceremony in English so that I could do my part in English, but that came with it’s own set of problems.
Then Karina was there and I had to turn around so I wouldn’t see her in her dress. I gave up on trying to sort things out with the priest. There really wasn’t anything to sort out. He wasn’t going to learn English in the next five minutes and I wasn’t going to learn Spanish. The priest lined us up and suddenly I was walking down the aisle. I stood before the priest while my groomsmen sat in the pew behind me.
It’s important at this point to mention that I’m not Catholic, or even particularly religious, and once again, I don’t speak Spanish. Consequently, I didn’t figure out to turn around until my bride-to-be was about five feet away from me. I didn’t get to see her walk down the aisle. It didn’t matter though. When I saw her I was barely able to keep from crying. She was more beautiful in that moment than I had ever seen her.
We sat in the chairs that had been provided for us as the priest began the mass. During a Catholic mass there is a lot if sitting, standing, and kneeling, in no particular order. I was prepared for that. We had pillows and a small dias in front of us for the kneeling. We sat for a while, then stood, then knelt. And there we stayed, kneeling for the next 40 minutes.
It didn’t take long to forget about the solemnness of the occasion. After about ten minutes the foremost thought in my mind was when I would be allowed to stand or sit down again. After suffering from a neck and shoulder injury for four months, the strain on my back was enormous. My one other thought was food. I wasn’t going to pass out from nervousness, but I was worried that I was going to pass out from lack of food. I was also going numb from the waist down from kneeling for so long.
Every few minutes me and Karina would smile at each other. The priest made a joke about how much English he knew (”H.E.B., K-Mart, y Wal-Mart”) that broke the tension. When it came time for us to speak our vows the priest and his assistant pulled out the book with the English text for us to read from. I mentioned before that the book came with it’s own set of problems. The biggest of which was that it did not also contain the Spanish text. Consequently, neither the priest or his assistant had any idea which parts of the text we were supposed to read. They seemed to point at paragraphs randomly and at one point made me read the priest’s lines.
There I knelt, reading “We are gathered here today…” That isn’t actually the portion that I read, but my memory of those few minutes is a bit hazy. I remember one of my groomsmen, Mykey (Miguel), heckling from behind me: “Come on, get it together Chat!”
I was informed afterward that one of my Best Men, Bob (Roberto), Mykey’s fraternal twin brother, elbowed him in the ribs quite hard at that point to quiet him down. Most grooms would probably get mad at a groomsman for heckling him during the ceremony, but I was relieved. It took some of the attention off of the fact that I was reading completely the wrong thing. Besides, as I told Karina later on, our wedding was a comedy, not a drama.
A wedding should be a fun thing. Forget the solemnness, it isn’t really possible anyway. Something always happens. No wedding goes the way it is planned. I had read that, seen it on TV, and mentally prepared for it. OK, so a wedding should be a “joyous occasion.” We took that to mean a “fun thing.”
And just like that the ceremony was over and we were walking down the aisle together, towards the back door and the waiting car. When we got into the car we realized that we didn’t get to kiss at the end of the ceremony. Of everything that happened, the various little things that went wrong or were out of place, when it was all over that was the one thing I regretted the most.
I also regretted not bringing the CD that had our first dance song on it. We had a live band at the reception that had some CDs also, and we managed to find a nice song to play instead. I just wish I could remember what it was. I think you are supposed to know what your first dance song is.
After the dance were the photos. First the photographers took the pictures they were supposed to take, then came the family photos. Then more family photos, and more family photos, then the extended family photos, then the 2nd and 3rd cousin photos. If you ever plan to marry a Mexican, please be aware that while you will probably have 30-40 people at the wedding and reception, he or she will have 300-400. Almost all of them will be family and all of them will want to take pictures with the bride and groom. So it is written, so shall it be.
I was barely able to stand or stay conscious. All I wanted was food. I looked over and saw that my family and friends were eating. Everybody in the hall was eating in fact. But people just kept coming. One after another to get their photos out of the way early. We finally got to sit only to have to get right back up again when more people came over for photos. Then we got to sit again but as soon as the food was brought to us people started coming up to us to congratulate us and talk to us, at length.
I get rather moody after about 12 hours without food. That’s putting it mildly. Karina helped me through it though. She was a pillar that evening. It didn’t bother her at all that I forgot the CD or that the flowers on the 35 centerpieces were the wrong color, or that none of the flowers were the right color, or that the band only played one type of music. Not even when she mentioned those things over and over again. It didn’t bother her one bit. She even told me “It doesn’t matter what goes wrong, it won’t upset me because it’s our wedding day.”
We ate our dinner, chicken with rice and potatoes. It was good, let me tell you that right now. Not just because I was starving either. I remember when we had the tasting to pick which food we would serve and it was just as good then too.
After dinner came all of the other festivities. The dancing and the drinking. Making the rounds to talk to people. More pictures. The band kept playing that one type of music and my family wasn’t able to dance to it. After an hour or so, Karina and I went up to ask them to change things up a bit. The band leader in turn asked us to dance the next song.
We got on the floor and danced a song and then we were ambushed with the game festivities, which started off with some silly dances. Karina comes from a family of very good dancers and is no slouch herself. I on the other hand was born with two left feet, no rhythm, and body parts that seem to move independently of one another, and not in a good way. So she was somewhat annoyed when I got into the flow of things and perfected the silly dances while she was lost. In the coming years I am certain that I will no doubt look back upon that as one of the best parts of the reception.
After the silly dances were some strange games. The band gave everybody these long, thin balloons. Karina and I got into the middle of the dance floor and about a hundred people formed a circle around us. Then, at the direction of the band leader, everybody rushed in and beat us with the balloons, then rushed back out. They repeated this several times. Now, given the size and shape of the balloons, my friends naturally wielded them in a rather untoward fashion that I will henceforth leave to your imagination. It was a very strange moment for me as I was repeatedly beaten in this fashion.
Next, me and Karina stood on chairs, holding hands high above our heads while everybody charged around the dance floor together and then ran under our arms. On the first pass, Karina was knocked almost off her chair. I think that might have been a standard wedding game, but not having been to very many weddings, it was completely new to me.
After that was the tossing of the bouquet and garter. The bouquet didn’t fly far enough and landed on the ground several feet in front of the women and girls waiting to catch it. I then got to witness what resembled an NFL fumble when every player on the field jumps on the ball and attacks each other in an attempt to recover it. This little six year old girl threw herself on the ground and slid into it. Two other girls jumped on top of her and began to fight for it while two dozen grown women fell on top of the three little girls. That first little girl was having none of it though, proving that she had strength far beyond her years as she risked life and limb to fight them off.
She stood up with a half-crazed look in her eyes, not quite understanding the insanity of the grown women but certain that she had won a great prize. Her victory was short-lived however as she was immediately stripped her of the bouquet. It was given back to Karina to toss again without the little girls on the floor to catch it. Apparently this is only a game for the grown-ups. I don’t know who caught it the second time around. It was anti-climactic after the first toss.
For the garter toss they brought out a chair for Karina to sit in, I knelt before her, and everybody else formed a circle around us. She once again asked me not to make the removing of the garter into a burlesque show (she had asked several times before the event as well). I obliged but I had to grin when Bob jokingly dropped to the ground to leer. He didn’t get to see anything, I made sure of that.
I stood up, the men formed a group behind me and I threw it as hard as I could. It went about five feet, those things just aren’t very aerodynamic. It was ok though because Mike, one of the Best Men, managed to catch it anyway. I didn’t plan for him to catch it, I didn’t know where he was in the group, and I tried to throw the garter towards the back of the group (as hard as I could), not the front where he was standing, but I couldn’t have asked for the garter toss to have happened better. You see, I’m the Best Man at Mike’s wedding in October.
The final game was pure Mexican tradition. The six groomsmen ran over and grabbed me and started tossing me in the air. After seven or eight tosses they all held me while one of them took off my shoes. They then set me down, standing in my socks and started herding me towards Karina who informed them that they screwed up the game by leaving my socks on. Bob, ever-helpful, slung me over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes while someone hurriedly pulled my socks off. Surprisingly, nobody passed out.
I was made to sit down in a chair and Karina knelt in front of me and put my socks and shoes back on my feet. It symbolizes that she will be there to take care of me. Needless to say, I liked that game.
With the games out of the way it was time for the Best Man’s toast. It had been decided that only Mike would give it. I can’t say that any of us have had a lot of experience at standing up in front of a group of several hundred strangers and making a speech. I don’t think he was particularly looking forward to it, but he did great. It helped that only about fifty people in the room could understand what he was saying. I won’t be so lucky when I get to give his speech a month from now. Still, he had to stand on stage and use the band leader’s microphone so everybody could hear him.
He told everybody how Bob had introduced Mike to me four years ago saying that we would be good friends. The same day we met Mike told me that he knew we would be best friends for life. At the time I thought to myself “woah, I just met you.” Over the years I’ve become somewhat wary of people and I don’t make friends that quickly. He was right though. Four years later we are Best Man at each other’s weddings, only a month apart. He also told everybody how happy he was for me and how happy he could see that Karina made me. I plan to re-use a tiny bit of that speech next month. I’ll change Karina’s name to Pam though, that’ll make it different.
As Mike was about to hand the microphone back to the band leader Bob got up to make a speech also. I don’t remember much of what he said because other people were talking to me at the same time, but it was a good speech. When he finished he handed the microphone to Sean, who about fifteen minutes later would have to be assisted out of the reception hall due to what could only be described as alcohol poisoning.
As my mom looked up curiously the panic began to well up inside me. I yelled to him “Keep it clean. My mother is right here, keep it clean!” He kept it clean, I think. Nobody could really understand anything he said. When he finished he started calling out to other people to come up and make speeches. He gave a shout out to Tarran, my other friend from the Bahamas who had travelled 1,500 miles to be there, to come up and “represent” for Thyme Online, the company that Tarran and I work for. There was nothing left to do but take the microphone from Sean and help him off of the stage.
We hurriedly finished the champagne and then the whole wedding party moved from the front of the stage to the wedding cake for the cutting of the cake. That was a very short event, punctuated by several photographs, after which I was desperately hoping for a chance to sit down.
Which I didn’t get to do. We had to take more photos, visit with more people, and make the rounds to all of the tables. We thanked everybody and Karina made sure I was introduced to everybody. In between, we danced a few songs. As the evening drew to a close we said goodnight to people, including my family, and helped her parents load up everything that we had to take back from the reception hall.
This is the point I had always imagined that the wedding party handled while I took my new bride to our hotel suite, kicked open the door, and carried her across the threshold to spend the night together. Alone. Again, for those of you who might one day marry a Mexican, this is not how things go.
Instead we got into a car and drove 20 minutes deeper into Mexico to go to one of her aunts’ place for the after party. I was tired and upset and not very understanding of this particular tradition. From the time girls are four years old they begin planning their wedding, filling in every little detail as the years go by. It is assumed that we men never even think about our future wedding until we are actually standing at it, being told what to do. That isn’t quite true.
I won’t pretend that we plan details out when we are kids the way women do, but we do have pictures in our head of what things look like and how they happen. In my picture the bride and groom most definitely do not go to the after party. Like I said before, I wanted to pick her up, kick open the door, and carry her into our hotel suite. I had pictured that moment from the day of our engagement. I tried to help plan the other details, but in reality that meant going along with what I was told on a lot of things. I just wanted this one thing and I didn’t get to have it. At least not the way I wanted.
I mean no disrespect to any of Karina’s family members who were at the after party. At the end of the day I’m glad we followed all of the traditions.
So we went to the party and I made only two requests of Karina. I asked that we stay as briefly as possible and I asked that she not abandon me with her family who speaks little to no English. We were there about 30 seconds before she left me with her uncles. At the after party, the bride and groom open the gifts they received and count the money that was given. Since we only asked for money, we counted that. We got almost enough to finish paying the wedding bills that we had left over, which is good. It means that we are broke and in debt, but not so badly that we can’t see a way out of it.
The drive back only took 15 minutes and the evening was finally drawing to a close. We got to our room and we both had our hands full. I forgot to carry her across the threshold and after set everything down I made her go back out into the hall with me so I could carry her in.
Then we closed the door.