My sister is comely

At last night’s wedding I heard a frat boy say over a microphone that my sister is “hot.” Under ordinary circumstances, this probably would’ve made me more than a little agitated, but last night I couldn’t deny it: My sister is hot. But I’d prefer we use the term “beautiful.”

Which leads me to my first observation. I’m not much of a crier, but when Dad walked my beautiful sister down the aisle, I had to do everything in my power to prevent the pool of water collecting in my eyes from swelling to a point that it overflowed down my face. Think about baseball, I told myself. It’s not so much that I didn’t want to be seen crying in public; it’s that I had to deliver a speech in 2 minutes.

But that’s not the observation. The observation is that I don’t know what kind of tears these were. I used to think of crying as being the result of intense happiness or sadness or anger or frustration or awe or what-have-you, but I was not crying for any of those reasons, I don’t think. I don’t even know how to describe what I was feeling because it was such a jumbled bag, but I’m pretty sure the wetness in my eyes could not be fairly attributed to any one emotion or three emotions. Instead, it was the result of seeing two of the most important people in my life whom I love very much in a peak moment in their lives, with my dad, the most genuinely sweet man I know, walking his precious and now smoking hot daughter, whom not long ago he was cradling in one arm as he worked on his Master’s thesis with the other, down the brick aisle toward matrimony. These were tears of metaphor.

(I needed another couple of tissues as I thought about that.)

The night before the wedding, I slept as I usually do, like a baby who had a couple of beers. But it was a major struggle to fall asleep after the wedding, even though this time I actually had beer in me. There was so much activity and so much emotion from the night that my brain was racing to try to assimilate it all. It had more important things to do than sleep.

When people ask me about the wedding I’ll probably mention the fact that unlike as predicted there was not a single raindrop, and that the sun even peeked out just in time for the ceremony. I might also mention the band who effectively covered everything from AC/DC to Madonna, with you sometimes having to look up to make sure that it wasn’t really Madonna. Or I might mention the key lime and chocolate raspberry cupcakes, the squirrel that fell onto someone’s white-clothed table, and the narrowly-averted drunken toast disasters.

What will be harder to express is the general perfection of the night.

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Bonus story: You’re trying to get *who* to dance?

As demeanors go, mine tends to be pretty straight-laced and monotone, some might even say boring. But people seem to think there is this crazy wild side of me just waiting to be let out if I only get enough alcohol in me. That explains why a number of people had it as a goal to get me on the dance floor. My sister upped the ante by assigning it as a job to one of her bridesmaids to “get Justin to dance.” I don’t know if you’ve ever been tasked with getting a person who is equal parts boring and stubborn to dance, but this is no easy assignment.

It’s true that I loosen up with a sufficient amount of beer, but if there is an outgoing partier suppressed somewhere deep within me, then it has yet to show itself — even to me. I want to be clear that my boringness in no ways means that I “play it safe.” I am relatively tolerant of risk – my speech was comparing marriage to dogs, after all – but as best as I can tell, whatever “Wild” is housed deep within me is not going to be freed by alcohol or by other people wanting me to. Singing and dancing, to my puritanical self, are activities best kept private — at least if you sing or dance like me. No amount of beer or peer pressure is going to change that opinion. And I’m okay with that.

The thing is, I don't come from a family of great dancers. I’m okay with that, too. I have no problem with other people awkwardly dancing, and in fact, I encourage it. I’ve said before that when I am Patriarch Justin, I am going to order that my family hold an annual dance party at which I will not dance, but will look on with a smile. In most areas of life I prefer participating over spectating, but this is not one of them.

So did they succeed in getting me to dance? Yes and no. I danced for half of two songs with three of the women most important to me: My sister, Mom, and my other big “sister,” Iris (the bridesmaid with the tough assignment). But these were slow dances. It ended up being a win-win because they felt accomplished for getting me on the dance floor, not realizing that I am totally fine with slow dancing, which to me is basically an elongated hug with some slightly-rhythmic shuffling of feet. I can handle that.

The Wild, though, is yet to be discovered.