Wedding weekend
The wedding was lovely.
Up until the last minute, there was some uncertainty about whether it would have to be moved indoors on account of rain. But the threatening clouds cleared up a bit, so that by the time the ceremony started there was some blue sky visible, and the weather obligingly stayed nice throughout the ceremony.
There were readings (from The Little Prince, and from Ogden Nash, and a lovely sort of love-poem collage) and music and rings and vows, and green hills, and a Montana sky that we all agreed was in fact bigger than skies elsewhere, and I got all misty pretty much from the start. Good stuff.
After the ceremony, there was conversation and music and food and poetry (a different love poem at each table; I was particularly partial to the one at our table, Anne Sexton's "I Remember"), and yummy pie instead of cake, and then dancing (to a bluegrass band) long into the night.
I met and got to chat with cool new folks, and a couple of people I'd met and liked before but hadn't seen in ages (and was reminded how much I like hanging out with publishing-type people), and even though I got a tad socially overwhelmed by the end of the evening, the whole thing was lovely.
Congratulations once again to Karen and Allen!
(I should momentarily backtrack to say that before the wedding, I met up with Mykle near the university and we chatted and had lunch; I haven't seen him in much too long, so it was nice to get a chance to catch up over the course of the day.)
I didn't sleep so well last night, alas; woke up twice in the middle of the night, finally got back to sleep, then was awakened by a phone call on the hotel-room phone from someone who had called the wrong number. I groggily mumbled "I think you may have the wrong number," and he kind of aggrievedly said "They gave me the wrong number," as if to make clear to me that it was someone else's fault and not his that he was waking me up. But then he said sorry and hung up. But I was more or less awake by then.
I did email and stuff for a while; eventually checked out of the room and went over to K&A's new house, which was also lovely. Most (though not all) of the people I had enjoyed talking with the night before were there as well; glad to get a bit more time to chat with them, though I was a little too groggy and a little too oversocialed to be a very good conversationalist.
We all headed out, and then I realized I had a few hours to kill before my flight home. There were no earlier flights I could try for standby on. I needed something that wouldn't take any social energy; I was going to go sit in a cafe and work on my computer, but then I remembered that I'd been intrigued by signs for the Museum of the Rockies.
I took a ridiculously roundabout route to get there, but eventually found the place. Spent a while wandering through the dinosaur exhibit, which is quite nice overall, with a nifty emphasis on showing facts about dinosaur sites and then showing hypotheses derived from those facts. Also wandered through the rest of the museum; then attended a planetarium show about the Hubble, which I basically slept through.
Headed back toward the airport an hour or so earlier than necessary, which turned out to be good because I missed the freeway exit and the next exit was nine miles later.
But eventually I found my way to the airport, returned the rental car, got a sandwich at the restaurant, and flew home. Both flights were pretty uneventful.
Kam picked me up at SJC and brought me home. And now I have a few days at home before my next trip!
My other favorite bit of poetry on Saturday was a line from the collage poem, which turns out to have been a line from Wendell Berry's "The Country of Marriage":
I give you what is unbounded, passing from dark to dark,
containing darkness: a night of rain, an early morning.