The third installment of the trial that was our wedding day....I need to clarify a couple things I wrote previously. One of Mower's close friends did also work at Thank Christ It's Payday, and he sat vigil with the family during the hospitalization. So someone there did care, but they were friends long before starting to work there, so I didn't think of him as one of the Evil Empire's employees. Also, one of the friends Mower called did show up unexpectedly after the ceremony was over, and he came to lunch with us. To pay Mower back for his last minute information, his friend called him one night and told him that he was getting married the next day. He one-upped Mower by giving even less notification than Mower gave him, plus his friend told him his bride-to-be was pregnant. Our first borns are six months apart, and we are planning their wedding now. They have already had their first kiss. They are having a baby girl very soon, and she will be betrothed to Handsome if I have any say in it.

We got to the diner for lunch, and they were clearly unprepared for a large party. The waitstaff kind of fumbled around, unsure of how to move the tables into a conformity that could accomdate all of us, without getting a screwdriver to pop the seal of congealed grease holding the tables into position on the floor. To be fair, the diner had a cool retro vibe, and decent diner food, with awesome shakes and malts, so that made up for the staff of high school juniors and newly paroled/escaped criminals. Still, I watched America's Most Wanted that week to ensure no one working there was due for a tip phone call to John Walsh.

Before we were allowed to sit at the wobbly tables, my mother insisted on placing centerpiece. It was a surprise to have a bouquet to hold during the ceremony, and boutonnieres for the men, but the centerpiece was too much. I was holding my sweet baby niece, and promptly placed her on the table next to the light pink roses. She shredded the arrangement in perfect baby joy, which delighted me to no end. Pink is my mother and grandmother's color, not mine. The bouquet I was given was pink roses, the centerpiece was pink roses, another bouquet was pink roses, the flowers on my mother's too-tight ruffled-skirted dress were pink roses....My favorite color at the time was green, and the cake had green and white flowers on it, and there were green and white balloons, so a little effort was made in the purchase of unnecessary and unwanted items.

The thought counts, I guess, except in this regard: Mower's and my wedding day was ours. We wanted to call the shots. For us, we just wanted to have a simple wedding without frills and a simple lunch, with the intention of still having a big, white, family wedding later when we could afford it. For family to change aspects of our day was disrespectful, even with the best of intentions behind them. They could have planned a separate function, as a surprise, if they needed to do something close to the first ceremony, and just honored our wishes for one day. That didn't happen, and it has always been an annoyance, while at the same time was nice that they were part of it. That seems to contradict but works well in my head in order to simultaneously love them and dislike that aspect of disrespect.

My mother had indeed put her hand into the cake, just a little, and we graciously overlooked that and prayed she washed her hands before handling it. Mower and I have lots of pictures of us cutting and scooping up the cake, each deciding if we should slam a mouthful into the other's face. I tried to get him first, but he pulled away. He then slammed my first bite into my upper lip and into my nostrils. I didn't look around to see what the truck-drivers and pedophiles in the diner were thinking of our spectacle.

Overall, lunch went well and it was very nice to have grandparents there and the baby. She stole the show, which was fine with me. Kids are not an annoyance to me, unless they are unchecked in their behavior and creating a scene. The lunch seemed to drag on, with a few whispers between family members and some of them leaving the table. The wait staff almost exploded upon impact of the words, "Can we use two credit cards to pay for the check?" Math? They had to do math? Somehow it did get split between my parents and Mower's, which was sweet of the rents.

We got outside after an hour and a half in a greasy diner, having 1,076 photos taken of us. We were then besieged by my car awash in flowers, bows, and instead of tin cans behind the car, my mother had made the one thing that was really personalized for Mower and me: a stream of Diet Dr. Pepper cans on ribbons. This is a crappy picture of a picture, but you get the idea:

It really set off my stickers on the car. Fukengruven. Mean People Suck. DARE Drugs Are Really Expensive. Nice People Swallow. It was a nice touch, but did make the rest of my personality ala stickers stand out in inappropriateness. We hung out in the parking lot for a while, and then made our good-byes.

That night, Mower and I went to a St. Patrick's Day party hosted by Budweiser, that sounded like a lot of fun for young 20-somethings. Wrong. In addition to being stressed about everything else, since it was Budweiser, they only sold Bud products and did not have Guinness, Mower's favorite. It pissed him off that we paid a cover charge to get into the party, and he hated the taste of the urine they called a dark beer. I finally convinced him that it was pointless to end the day unhappy, so we withdrew the remaining $43.00 from my checking account and went to the pub where we had our first date, one year before, and enjoyed the rest of the night. I will leave out any other wedding night details.

We have had seven years together now, and Mower still enjoys his Guinness on our anniversary more than talking to me, and drinks even more when he thinks of the wedding reception at a diner. I just looked in the wedding "album" and saw the last picture is of the sign above the front door of the diner, as if to burn into our memories that we can never again go there and not think of my niece tearing apart a pink roses centerpiece.