Oh, Larry The Cable Guy, what you and Billy and John have done to me.

I’m at a wedding on Saturday.  It was the wedding of a certain local assistant fire chief and his beautiful bride.  They’re about my age, and friends of mine, so I accompanied my dad. 
“Which church is it?” my dad asked me.  For a town of about two hundred people, we have a plethora of churches.  I knew where it was, but the Presbyterian and Methodist churches are across from each other and both red brick, and I never remember which is which. 
I pointed to the street we needed to take, and then I said, “That one.”
“How’d you know?” my dad asked.
I roll my eyes. “The firetruck parked out front,” I said dryly.

Some of the fascinating details are simply too fascinating for the internet, so please speak to me privately if you would like to know.

We greeted the fellow fire department outside, hovering around the firetruck.  Actually, most of them were busy filling their inner lips with tobacco, which my friend Melanie and I find disgusting, so we let them ooh and ahh over the truck, while we found ourselves inside the 110 degree-with-no-air-conditioning-church.

“Ladies and Gentlemen,” the pastor began, “We are gathered here to celebrate the blessed union of this couple.  As this is a sacred event, we ask that you refrain from flash photography during the ceremony.  The couple also requests that all pagers be turned down. In the case of a structure fire in the county, there will be a brief hiatus of the wedding ceremony until the groom returns.”

“Oh,” I sighed. “Lord have mercy,” and I fanned myself with the bulletin.

Fortunately, the ceremony went off without a hitch, if you don’t count one of the men in my row yelling, “Don’t do it!” when the groom put his ring on the bride’s finger, and when the groom had to remove his chewing tobacco to kiss the bride.

But we knew that was coming.

At the reception, I do not kid you, someone I haven’t seen in a while came up to me and said, “I heerd you done git yerself an eddication.”
Without even thinking about it, I turned to him and said, “Yep, I did done git meself eddicated.”

I love this crazy, tragic, sometimes almost magic, awful beautiful life…