Hold my Hand

I heard an uncommonly large amount of Hootie & the Blowfish this weekend while I was in NEPA. Most of this was while cruising in my mom's white LaSabre.

The trip was nice. Three days is the perfect amount of time to visit home. I saw all of my family and enough of my friends. I got a little drunk. A couple of times. Everyone was nice to each other and we didn't run out of things to talk about.

The wedding was nice. Patty and Bird. A cute couple. High school sweethearts and now husband and wife. I still have Bird's little league baseball card of him when he was in third grade. It's cute. The men in the wedding party all wore cowboy boots and hats. When I was in the mens' room at one point of the evening, a man from another ballroom broke the "no talking at the urinal rule" and asked me if we were from Texas. "No, Thornhurst" and I left it at that and he asked no further questions.

In a previous post I had some anxiety about the wedding. Some of my concern regarded my circle of friends who are growing apart - mostly because some of us have moved away and others haven't. But we were all gracious (or at least drunk) and had a good time. No cash bar - the Yuengling flowed freely. We pushed aside our differences and spent most of our time reminiscing.

My much bigger anxiety regarded Bird. He recently began treatment for some sort of cancer. I can pronounce the type of cancer but I'm surely not going to try to spell it. I was worried that the wedding would be very sad, but it wasn't. We celebrated and had a great time. In our Polish tradition, we paid a dollar to dance with the bride and then surrounded her so that the groom couldn't steal her away. In our honky-tonk tradition, we line danced. And despite our homophobic tradition, we did the "YMCA." I was selected to wear the headdress.

I caught up on my gossip. The 9th grade English teacher is having an affair with my geometry teacher who is getting a divorce. My high school principal, who's a moron, is finally retiring. He was married to the 10th grade English teacher but divorced her to marry my 8th grade English teacher. She previously had been married to the physics teacher, who currently is married to the librarian. I do have the dirt on other small-town politics but that's not nearly as interesting as who's sleeping with whom.

Back to the wedding: the best man ended up sleeping with one of the bridesmaids. Neither of them came out to the bar with us after the recepetion. Neither did my 2nd grade teacher, whom Palmer tried to convince that she should come out drinking with her previous students. Yes, "Wreckin' Ball" Palmer was in prime condition. Her stories made even less sense than normal and she kept offering our nachos to the band. And then they actually took them. (On a side note, Wreckin' Ball was given her drinking name by our 11th grade English teacher, who went with us to Greece. He also dubbed Patty's drunken alter ego - "Danger Girl". As far as I know, he has not slept with any other teachers from my school.)

As Patty commented, it was a great way to end a wedding - surrounded by old friends, drinking beer and eating nachos, and listening to Greatful Dead Covers.