This was first posted as a Facebook “Note” on March 11, 2018. Facebook has been neglecting and outright killing the “Notes” feature for years, recently removing a lot of the formatting and making them difficult to find and share. I’m re-posting here, a place that Facebook won’t even allow me to link to, for safekeeping.

The following is an unnecessarily long yet wildly incomplete catalog of the events surrounding the wedding of my sister, Katherine Vlasak Meo, and Christopher Meo--both of whom are perfectly lovely people who bear only incidental responsibility for this discursive silliness.

Wednesday, 28 February 2018

3:35 pm

The car is mostly packed, and here we are in the basement, trying to convince a cat that it’s actually a perfectly sensible time for dinner. She’s accustomed to eating about three hours from now, so even though she (1) watched me prepare the bowls of food, (2) followed me from the kitchen to her eating place, and (3) witnessed the other two cats happily eating their own early meals--despite all that, when I placed her food on the floor, she, of course, looked up at me and ran away, directly to the basement. No one will be back to feed her until tomorrow morning, and she needs both food and thyroid medicine, because of course she does. So here I am, calling out “Penny” in the basement--using language to logic my cat to eat, easily the most desperate moron within 40 or 50 miles, me not her but her also--here we are, Calvin and Katie and I, trying to convince the whiniest, begging-ist, most food-anxious creature in our household to go chow down on the early bird special. Eventually--with no credit due whatsoever to my earnest pleading but only to the infernal whims of cat--she runs up the stairs and furiously scarfs down her meal faster than the other two despite their head start, suddenly her usual food-terrified self, consumed by the dread that she’ll never eat again.

3:50 pm

Given the likelihood of a truly excessive number of people crashing at Mom’s house this weekend, the four of us included, it seems prudent to bring our own pillows, so I stuff four pillows in the car. It seems to me that even hundreds of miles from home, on a strange bed, if you’ve got your own pillow, you should be able to sleep all right. This is what I imagine saying to Calvin and Katie three hours into a weepy bedtime routine, the sort of plausible bullshit kids fold into their knowledge base without much effort. Is it insulting to arrive at Mom’s with four pillows, in a hospitality-disparaging kinda way? I do not know. But potential maternal offense as a result of assumption of minor hospitality deficiency is a risk I am willing to take for the sake of a guaranteed and familiar pillow, apparently. (To be fair, I have rarely proven risk averse in matters of potential maternal offense.) The car is quite full, now. I strap the children in, and then spend five or ten minutes running around the house trying to figure out what I forgot to do.

4:30 pm

We’ve collected Lori from work, and I walk out of the dry cleaner place with a garment bag full of a suit and shirt and Lori’s dress, and I realize that I haven’t left much room for a whole other pile of anything, never mind freshly de-wrinkled formal wear, especially what with the pillows. I briefly consider my options, nearly all of which involve telling Lori about stuffing the bag of very recently expensively cleaned and pressed formal wear into a rather small hole and then closing the trunk lid on it, which is what I do, except for the telling Lori part. Why start the seven hour car ride with exasperated, shoulders-shrugging, what are you gonna do good-humored drama? Surely that’s a more amusing conversation on the back side of the trip. Besides, it’s all laying pretty flat, and with the trunk lid pressing down on it, it’s kind of like a very low heat iron, if you think about it. Totally fine.

4:35 pm

The key to any good road trip is to start with the five year old tearfully unable to explain which flavor of Clif bar he wants for snack, in part because his preference is not actually among the available options. He wants “the one Katie has,” he says. Katie has requested the chocolate chip, so Lori hands him a chocolate chip oat bar, as well. “No!” He wants “the one Katie has, the other day.” This is some transitive verb tense confusion bullshit, Calvin cries, or should have. Sometime, about two weeks ago, Katie had a white chocolate macadamia nut oat bar. It was the last white chocolate macadamia nut oat bar, perhaps in the western hemisphere, but at least in our Honda, which is what matters today, now. We don’t have that kind, I tell him. Just eat what you have. You like that kind, I insist. Do ladies need their own lady-branded scotch, the radio wants to know. Lori switches to the Book of Mormon cast recording, which has the intended mollifying effect on the terrorists in the back seat.

6:45 pm

We take a left turn off our usual route, to avoid traffic and to detour to a Chick-fil-A. “We’ve never been this way before,” Calvin says. He’s not wrong. Do ladies need their own lady-branded scotch, the radio wants to know, again, because the answer was not forthcoming two hours ago, or because we’re on our second time through All Things Considered. My favorite joke to tell myself, whenever there is a story on All Things Considered that I find beneath the dignity or appropriate purview of a national news magazine radio program, is to say to myself, “Really stretching the title to the breaking point tonight, Audie,” or Ari, or whoever is hosting. I say it is my favorite joke, but it never makes me laugh, it’s just that I say it to myself rather frequently. I am bad at jokes, is what I am saying.

11:30 pm

The kids begin to wake up less than a mile from Mom’s house, thanks to the alarm clock that goes off in kids’ dreams when the low whine of the highway gives way to the start and stop of suburban exit ramps and old high school intersections. “We’re almost there, guys,” Lori says. “You two have just experienced one of the top-5 best features of being a kid--waking up mere moments away from the destination at the end of a long car ride,” I say. “I didn’t sleep,” Calvin says. “You’ve been asleep since nine-thirty, bud,” I say. “I didn’t sleep,” Calvin insists. All right, man. All right.

Thursday, 1 March 2018

12:15 am

Calvin and Katie are asleep in the bed upstairs, no doubt thanks to the familiar contours of their sleep-time head and neck supports. I look in the fridge for something to counteract the caffeine, podcasts, and general New Jersey-ness rattling around inside my head, and there are, shockingly, two beers in the fridge door. One of them, an IPA, has a dismaying expiration date of early last summer. The other, a Guinness, offers no such warnings. It doesn’t quite produce the traditional foamy Guinness head upon pouring, but I sit on the couch and drink most of it before deciding that it is probably from last summer, too, and is pretty gross. I’m concerned that Andrew will be pulling into the driveway soon, so I shuffle upstairs. (It’s not just that it’s Andrew, of course--if he shows up with alcohol, there’s a strong likelihood that the drinking and socializing will go on far later than would be wise for the first day of this trip. Also, it’s Andrew.)

12:30 pm

Katherine invited Lori and Katie to join her and the bridal party for the whole pre-wedding mani/pedi deal, so the three year old has returned with bright pink toenails and sparkly blue fingernails. She is overwhelmingly pleased with herself, because she believes she is 29 years old, and appreciative of finally being treated like the adult she is. I find myself made uncomfortable by the idea of someone being paid to glamorize my child’s feet and hands, mostly because I don’t want her internalizing the idea that other people will serve her, I don’t want her thinking of other people in this way. I recognize that this is, perhaps, because I am intensely weird. I don’t even like ordering delivery, for the same reason.

3:30 pm

They’ve turned DePiero’s Farm into a giant Wegmans within a mini-mall, complete with a Chipotle and a Starbucks and some sort of stationary bicycle singles bar, and it’s all as confusing as it sounds. At the same time, I have hazy memories of DePiero’s--which was sort of like a proto-Whole Foods in its day--selling, like, mattresses and knock-off Pier 1 accoutrements upstairs, so that whole property has an historical aura of confounding strangeness to it, anyway. The Wegmans has a giant warehouse of a liquor store inside of it, but you can’t buy any of your groceries over on that side, and you can’t buy any of your alcohol over on the grocery side, because New Jersey is confused about what keeping kosher means, I think. Still, the booze is cheaper than it is in Virginia, where the government leverages the buying power of the commonwealth to charge us 20-30% more for liquor. This Wegmans is slightly newer than our new Wegmans in Charlottesville, but I see more stray carts propped up on curbs and left in parking spaces and rolling slowly through the lot of their own volition in two minutes than I’ve seen in six months at our Wegmans. This is presumably because, similar to the restrictions about pumping gas, it is actually illegal to return your own cart to a cart corral in New Jersey. Either that, or everybody is just way too goddamn important to bother. “I don’t have time to return my cart, not with Vinny and Alana and Erika waiting for me at CycleBar,” rationalizes Northern New Jersey, before recycling their plastic bag and coffee cup onto the ground and bouncing their empty cart to a stop off a nearby BMW.

5:00 pm

Chris and Emily and baby Ryan have arrived from Texas, courtesy the Tom Harrington Newark Express Shuttle. Emily got to New Jersey and immediately bashed her own head into the aluminum and steel frame of a car, which is a sentiment I wholly understand. Everyone passes the baby around, touching her with their hands and breath and mouths and faces, trying to give her all the germs at once, so that she might prove her resilience and demonstrate worth to the tribe.

6:30 pm

Our Lady Mother of the Church smells exactly like it did twenty years ago, which is somehow how long it’s been since I made regular appearances here. Chris says something as we’re all walking up, something about how it seems smaller than he remembers it, and maybe he’s joking, I’m not sure--but it looms as small as ever before my eyes. The parking lot, on the other hand, seems huge, spreading out flat and gray behind us, and empty. Inside, the giant off-white plaster field of grain backdrop that dominated so many Saturday nights and Sunday mornings remains--a 1980s aesthetic that I suppose could possibly go back even further than that. It’s not a bad look--aside from the tacky gold metal sconces and chandeliers hanging everywhere, the church has a pleasant, arc-y kinda hominess to it. I’ve never been big on sconces.

7:15 pm

We run through the routine a couple of times, with a seemingly disproportionate focus on when everyone is meant to bow towards the altar. Father Sean is new to me, and he has the sort of pleasantly, jokingly serious disposition you’d expect to find in your priest. I am tasked with walking Grammy Hedley to her seat, and bowing at a designated moment, and that’s it. Katie has the real job between us, and she is well-prepared after months of flower-girling down her home hallway, a total professional. Afterwards, in the gym attached to the church, we find a half-deflated soccer ball and corporate convention booth handout foam football, and Calvin and Katie and a couple other kids of unknown (to me) Meo-parentage run around chasing and dodging and kicking and throwing balls until they are pink and melted in their sweatshirts. Lori is visibly weirded out by the whole church thing, which is a sentiment I wholly understand.

9:00 pm

Dinner is a big, tasty, multi-course affair at an Italian restaurant. I call it an “Italian restaurant,” but I suspect Chris Meo’s side of the family and his groomsmen would just call it “the restaurant,” what with the multiple bread appetizers and all the wine and fried seafood and absurd platters of various decadent desserts, and what with the Meo clan being extraordinarily Italian. Chris Meo gives us a preview of the waterworks to come at the wedding with his lovely address to friends and family, Calvin pops Andrew in the nose a handful of times in the middle of dinner because Calvin has a strong sense of his own duty in balancing the cosmic scales of justice, and the night is a great success. I help pile the kids in the car in the rain and Lori leaves to put them to bed. We all follow to the house not much later, me with a large styrofoam box full of eleven pounds of cannoli and cake under my jacket. “For Lori, who missed dessert,” I tell anyone within fifty feet, loudly and repeatedly.

10:30 pm

Back home from the rehearsal dinner, and the living room is appropriately alive with the noise of a bunch of half-drunk people on their way to being more drunk. The kids are asleep upstairs thanks entirely to the comfort afforded by familiar pillowing. Chris asks one of Katherine’s bridesmaids--whose name I couldn’t call up for a cool fifty bucks, who has just made A Thing about her age and upcoming birthday, and has asked us to guess how old she is going to be, and then surprises us all with the revelation that she is only going to be turning twenty--Chris asks her something like, “Why weren’t you around and hanging out with us five years ago, when I lived here?” (This sounds, on the page, far creepier than Chris meant it in real life, or how it sounded in the room, but there you have it. Sometimes, on the page, things are creepy.) “Because she was fourteen!” half the room shouts at Chris, who takes the chastening with the sort of self-assured self-effacement that he produces more convincingly and charmingly than anyone else on the planet--“oh, right,” he says, smiling. We play You Don’t Know Jack trivia and party games on the Nintendo. It’s a good time.

Friday

8:30 am

I come downstairs to make a cup of coffee and fry an egg, and there are way too many people running around--you’d think somebody was throwing a wedding today, or something. Ellen has already fed the kids, which is nice. Mom is convinced there is sugar in a place where fourteen people have been unable to find the sugar. (There is no sugar there.) Outside, the wind is blowing hard and steady, and it is raining, and it is snowing. I make my egg on toast, but I don’t get around to the coffee. Too much hectic action everywhere. There are hair and make-up people here, and bridesmaids, and everyone is happy, and outside the wind blows, whipping snow past the big windows at Mom’s house. I make my first of probably a half-dozen “It’s a nice day for a...WHITE WEDDING” Billy Idol impression jokes aloud, to no one in particular. I am bad at jokes, is what I’m saying.

11:30 am

There are police cars with lights flashing out on the street, zipping around the neighborhood with much speedy fanfare. This being Montvale, I assume the hub-bub is a result of criminal on-street parking arrangements necessitated by the large crowd, but it turns out there’s a tree branch on a power line around the corner. A firetruck arrives. We do not lose power, though all the lights dim whenever somebody pushes a button on the electric kettle. Lori and Emily and Andrea have disappeared to get their hair and make-up professionally applied, so Chris and I make a coffee run. Calvin and Katie are left behind at the house, which is a disorienting feeling, to be able to just leave them someplace with the assumption that they’ll be all right. I don’t think I even said anything to anyone. The Dunkin Donuts and John’s Bagels are still in the same spot, as is the Staples, which is far more disconcerting than if it had shut down in the interim. The grocery store in town, which long ago was an A&P, now is called ACME, and is further proof that we are all living in a Warner Bros simulation.

11:59 am

The photographers show up precisely on time, which is just goddamn amazing, given the weather situation. I let them in and proceed directly upstairs, to avoid being unnecessarily captured on film, and to put on my fancy clothes. Downstairs, everything is joy and general loud revelry. Calvin sits on the couch, playing Mario Kart in his sports jacket and tie and khakis, as one does.

1:15 pm

Lori and the kids and I get in the car and drive over to the church, ahead of the rest of the crowd. The wind blows steady at 20 miles per hour, gusting to 40, the snow whipping past too fast and wet to stick to anything or collect anywhere, and back at Mom’s, Katherine is the calm, joyful, beautiful center of everything.

2:00 pm

The service starts just about on time, I think, though I’m not sure, because I left my phone with Lori, so as to avoid looking like I have a giant glass and aluminum rectangle in my jacket pocket. I haven’t processioned through a church since my altar boy days. I ask Jesse, who is serving as altar-teen today, if he’s wearing the same robes I used to wear. Probably, he says. They do smell the same, I say. I walk Grammy through the church, and I think I at least nod, if not properly bow, at the right moment. The Lord likely wouldn’t buy my bow, anyway, if he’s all he’s cracked up to be. What’s worse, Lord--the self-conscious, insincere, deep bow, or the sort of nod used to greet any passing stranger I have no interest in actually talking to? Is the bow really for you, Lord, given the rather dubious prospect of your existence, or is it for everybody else, a whistling flare of my deep blessed beatitude-i-ness for the assembled to either appreciate or sneer at, depending on how they judge my sincerity? Is it merely virtue signaling, if you’re not there, Lord, or is it merely virtue signaling if you are there, Lord? Then I reach out and shake Chris’ hand, which definitely wasn’t part of the protocol, so hopefully Father Sean and/or the Lord isn’t the doctrinal type. You never know! Katie and her ring-bearing counterpart execute the flower-throwing and bearing of not-actually-the-rings with the height of post-toddler professionalism. Katherine is led through the church to be “given away” by her dad, Randy, in what is easily the weirdest and most overt display of THE (somewhat vestigial, at least) PATRIARCHY of the whole wedding mass--which is really saying something, in a Catholic mass, come to think of it.

2:10 pm

Chris delivers the first reading, which is three and a half lines from the book of Ruth. He definitely forgets to bow, and Father Sean arches a brow and makes a quick note in a small book he produces from his robes. Chris reads Ruth’s pretty words two octaves below his normal speaking voice and with the clipped, clenched-jaw seriousness of impending doom that is oddly appropriate to the proceedings--the permanent legal and spiritual binding of two fallible humans nothing if not also serious as a heart attack.

2:20 pm

Father Sean gives the homily, harping on the importance and virtue of having a church wedding, before the Lord, et al., instead of just shlepping to the courthouse or whatever. That’s fine. From a motivated self-interest kinda way, I understand why the pastor of the church wants to sell us on the importance of getting married in church. But when he starts in on the humility of the act, the arrogance of disbelief, the humility of faith, that’s where he loses me. According to the doctrines of Catholicism, in fifteen minutes or so Father Sean is going to perform a series of actions and prayers that will result in the divine miraculous transformation of bread and wine into actual flesh and actual blood--and he wants me to take seriously his thoughts on humility? Of all the confusing contradictions of the faithful, this is the one I’ve never been able to even begin to reconcile--their assertion that a lack of faith is arrogance, and a professed sincere faith is humility. Humble yourself before the Lord, we are told--wherein humility is believing that you have a special relationship with the creator of the universe. “I believe I know the answers to the greatest and most impenetrable mysteries with which human consciousness is capable of grappling,” he said, humbly.

2:30 pm

The vows are exchanged, and I am a bleary-eyed humbled mess, feeling things, of all things. I am humbled, despite myself, not before the Lord, but before two beautiful people standing in a room, who asked that all their favorite people gather to just listen as they declare their love and commitment to one another. Father Sean and the church and the state of New Jersey and the rest of us fall away, whipped into the swirling snowy skies, and here are Katherine and Chris, hands clasped, certain only of each other, needing nothing else.

2:40 pm

When did the Catholic mass start including explicit prayers for military and police? Is the organist about to break into the national anthem? What are the political and spiritual implications of kneeling for the national anthem...during mass?!

2:42

The profound weirdness of transubstantiation cannot be overstated. It occurs to me, as I watch the Lord, through Father Sean, transmogrify crackers and wine into the literal flesh and blood of Jesus Christ for the consumption of the assembled, that I think about this weirdness all the time, despite not having attended mass in nearly twenty years. That is some effective messaging! I, like a TOTAL BADASS, decline to participate in the flesh-eating ritual. Virtue signaled, or not signaled, or double signaled--I can’t tell anymore.

3:09 pm

Emily asks me to take a photo of herself and her baby. I take a couple of pictures before Chris arrives at their side, possibly preternaturally sensing the opportunity for a choice photo. I point and shoot, all stained glass and good cheeks and natural smiles, and I can already feel the future reflected glory of the notifications buzzing my phone.

5:00 pm

Alex and Amanda have been tricked into watching Calvin and Katie and Baby Ryan for the night, so that Chris and Emily and Lori and I can get a proper drunk on. This is the sort of favor that is impossible to properly repay, and I suspect extended as a way of ensuring that I will feel obligated to buy stuff from them in the future through some sort of sketchy social media-driven multi-level-marketing scheme. It will still have been worth it.

8:00 pm

Cocktail hour begins, and I am simultaneously ashamedly disgusted by the obscene display of plenty laid out before me in all directions and unable to decide which island of wanton culinary decadence I’m going to conquer first. Naturally, I start with a glass of bubbly pink alcohol and the mashed potatoes and mac and cheese, to establish my plebian everyman credentials with the 40-person strong front of the house serving crew. Soon enough I’m onto the sliders and the pizza and the sushi. There’s a fella rolling cigars and a giant ice luge for chilling shots. Have you been to the Hallway of Cured Meats? Did you visit the Cheese and Fruit Lounge? Perhaps a trip down to Prime rib and Lamb Chop Junction is in order! What’s that? Oh, that’s a half-inch slice of pork fat we’re calling bacon, and you’re supposed to eat it, like it’s a normal thing to have a 4500 calorie appetizer before you head into the grand ballroom for actual dinner. The midwives are literally swimming in hummus. Sarah bites the head off a pickled bat dipped in creme fraiche, the blood dripping off her chin, smiling at the midwives in their hummus jacuzzi, and then makes for Little Chinatown, where she fills a plate with fried rice and dumplings. I tie my tie around my forehead and plant a flag in the mac and cheese, demanding that any who would deny me a scoop, so that they might have one, prove the depth of their creamy, noodly desire by first engaging in hand-to-hand combat.

8:30 pm

Brian and Erica join us somewhere between my fifth and sixth plate of entirely different cuisine, the only thing tying my meal together the fact that I can’t help but to include a small slice of pizza with every round. “I haven’t seen such an absurd display of vulgar, obscene consumption since your wedding,” I compliment Erica, eyeing the Nation-state of Caprese over her shoulder. “I’ll be back in a minute, I’m going to take the trolley down to the bar. Anybody need anything,” I ask, but it’s not a question, and I’m just laughing and laughing and laughing. No, I’m not crying. I don’t think I’m crying.

9:15 pm

Have you ever wondered what sort of face I might make, were my sister to be introduced at her wedding in the fashion of a professional wrestler making an entrance, to the raucous grooves of Guns ‘n’ Roses’ only actually good song? (Welcome to the Jungle, obviously, is their only good song.) It turns out, this is that face:

Katherine and Chris have their first dance, and everyone is watching with their romantic googly eyes in, appropriately enough, but I can’t help but focus on something else. Kneeling at the edge of the dance floor is a young man who, with the assistance of at least two other people, is furiously shoving dry ice into a smoke machine. Maybe it’s the churning of the foods of 122 distinct nations in my belly, but I find this to be the funniest of all possible things that could be happening right now.

The song comes to an end, and our hero disappears into the field of suits and gowns behind him, like Shoeless Joe into the corn.

9:30 pm

Randy gives a lovely speech about what it has been like being Katherine’s dad lo these many years. Many are visibly touched, metaphorically. Here is what I would have said, if required under threat of force to deliver a speech about being Katherine’s brother: Katherine, you are the first person that I can ever remember having fallen in love with. You taught me about the weird miracle of going from not even knowing that a person existed to loving that person with all your heart, which is an impossibly huge gift to give an eight year old. I repaid that gift by convincing you that Chris and I were going to ride our bicycles to Jupiter and never see you again when you were three years old or so, among many other cruel tortures. You were crying on the front stoop after we’d circled the neighborhood, and I think I wasn’t allowed to ride my bike for a week after that. Brothers are the worst, eh? I love you, and though I’m not the sort of person who puts any stock in what anybody deserves, because deserve’s got nothing to do with it, there’s not a person on the planet who deserves better than you.

The Rest of The Night...

...is a series of drunken conversations of interest to no one but myself, I’m sure. Highlights include my repeated insistence that cousin Christopher take a course in symbolic logic, trying to find fat guys of a similar build to myself in our genealogy with Uncle Gil--grasping for any genetic excuse I can pin it on, really--, anything Billy said, and a brief exploration of my near crippling anxiety about being wrong about stuff with Brian and Brian. They open the dessert room--a football field-long beautiful horrorshow of sugar and chocolate and fruit and waffles and crepes and cakes and cookies and the desiccated, seasoned, and cured remains of three Oompa Loompas before an altar of three different fondue fountains--and something breaks in my brain, and I just start yelling “Ahh, what the fuck, Sarah?!” at passing strangers and family members alike. Truly, a beautiful evening. I stuff four pounds of rare-earth fudge and mined crystalline sugar stalactites in my suit pockets, grab a cup of coffee, stifle an Apology for Everything to every member of the service staff, and get on the shuttle.

(Footnote: I elected not to include any photographs of the food to avoid pushing this post decidedly into NSFW territory.)

The rest of this will be completed in an entirely different style at great expense and at the last minute, so as to ensure it is posted before Katherine and Chris’ golden anniversary.

Saturday

New Jersey is the most densely populated state in the nation, as evidenced by Mom’s house all day Saturday, with approximately 3.5 people per square meter. This might be kinda low for New Jersey, actually. Brian and Erica bring their boys over, and Calvin and Eli get to play all day. Eli has approximately seven times the athletic ability of Calvin, 2.5 times the HATERAGEWINWINWIN, and oodles of PHYSICALITY and COMPOSURE, and so dominates Calvin at all backyard activities. Calvin needs to get back to fundamentals. At some point, Katie takes a flying forward leap off a chair, somersaulting once before Ellen catches her before skull meets hardwood. Katie, though physically unharmed, descends into a fit of shame and self-reproach and is inconsolable for two weeks. It’s a good thing we’re not giving her any religion, because her in-built guilt and shame machine is already cranked to 11. Much later, after the kids are in bed, we go visit Saint Alex and Saint Amanda, who have a lovely home and from whom I will someday be obligated to purchase a timeshare. Back at Mom’s, Calvin and Katie are awake and throwing a fit, and someone calls and asks if I’ll sing Breakfast at Tiffany’s over the phone, to calm them down.

Sunday

1:45 pm

On our way home, Calvin and Lori are running across a parking lot, from the car to the rest stop building, while I wrestle Katie’s car seat and then try to stuff her feet back into her shoes--shoes that disappear into very small wormholes and reappear out of very small wormholes elsewhere in the car whenever the car reaches 55 mph. Mid-stride, to his mother, Calvin says, “Hey Mommy, you know what? I think my penis is out of my underpants.” She laughs, and says, “You should tell daddy.” “No, don’t tell daddy!” “Why not,” Lori wants to know. “Don’t tell daddy!” “All right, I won’t,” she lies. Calvin insists on touching, with various pockets of exposed skin, far more of the gross New Jersey public restroom fixtures than my stomach of dubious strength can currently handle. Katie very nearly brains herself on a stone countertop in front of the rest stop Burger King, and we really need to get out of here. I give Lori five bucks so she can buy a Whopper, Jr and run the kids out to the car, just ahead of certain calamity. They have only given Calvin four chicken nuggets in his six-piece order, and he swallows hard and blinks a few times, and then takes the news like a beautiful goddamn adult human being. “That’s ok, because I had a big snack.” The world, I want to give him, for his handling of the chicken nugget shortage situation. We pull onto the highway, just a few miles of New Jersey left, and a couple of plastic bags and other assorted trash bounce by. “I swear, I’m not just imagining it--there is more random trash traveling New Jersey’s highways than anywhere else we drive,” I say. “They’re not shy about their trash here,” Lori says.

6:45 pm

The trip ends as it began, with the feeding of cats, who lavish days of pent up affection and appreciation upon us before we are even through the front door. Congratulations Katherine and Chris, the beautiful couple--may you live a long, prosperous, healthy, cat-free life. Amen.