Married Ted

Nina and I went to that Yankees game: August 16th, versus Detroit. I hadn't been to the new stadium yet. First impressions? It feels bigger, cleaner. Maybe brighter. Like they've sort of streamlined the baseball-watching experience, made it more intense. We set out for the Bronx a bit late -- there was a thunderstorm in progress, a proper summer drenching, finally. But it had largely abated by the time the D train went above ground, and by the time we got to our seats, the first inning was over, the 2-1 Detroit. And it stayed like that pretty much all night. None of the Yankees' celebrity hitters seemed to be able to get on base, much less score a run; although some credit is due to Detroit's starting pitcher, Max Scherzer, who threw consistent strikeouts throughout. The exception, as far as I could tell, was Curtis Granderson, whom I'd never heard of before this game (the Yankees actually picked him up from Detroit, I found out later) -- he got on base pretty much every time he was up at bat, and was cagey and appealingly base-stealy.

We cheered at the appropriate times ("Make some noise!" said the plasma marquees) and in the appropriate ways ("hip-hip-Jorge!"), but the Yankees did fuck all until the 9th inning, when there was an unexpected almost-rally. They scored a run, got the bases loaded, and were poised to turn things around... but the Tigers made a double play off Derek Jeter and all of a sudden the huge electronic displays were reminding us to drive home safely. It was a spectacular bit of anticlimax.

It was this Spring over Sunday plates of cornmeal waffles in their penthouse apartment on President St. that Ted and Cat told me and Katie and Tom and Emma that they were engaged to be married. They planned to do the whole thing at the end of the summer, so as not to draw things out, and to do it on Cat's family's farm, out in Boyd, Minnesota. Nina and I just got back from it!

Except that the journey out did not go very well for us. We flew from LaGuardia to Chicago in the early afternoon on Friday, and were scheduled to fly from Chicago to Rochester at around 4:00 PM. Fifteen minutes before our flight was to board, the agent at the American counter announced over the loudspeaker that the flight was canceled due to inclement weather. No warning had been given, no other information was provided -- except that the longer we waited before hustling to the "rescheduling phone bank," the fewer options we'd have. Our arrival was already going to be cutting it pretty close to the beginning of the rehearsal dinner (featuring a much-anticipated pig roast), so we hustled, and through some guileful customer-service negotiating, Nina was able to get us on a flight to La Crosse, Wisconsin, leaving in a couple of hours. It wasn't great, but it was, apparently, the only option that got us there the same evening. We waited and sulked.

Eventually we boarded our flight to Wisconsin. It was short. We were seated with a number of servicemen and -women, evidently returning from abroad. Their families met them at the gate in La Crosse while we waited for a car from Bee Cab, the company who'd given us the best -- although not a great -- quote for the trip into Minnesota. We managed to triangulate the location of a noisy cricket between two panels of sidewalk. Our Bee Cab driver ended up being friendly; and her girlfriend, riding shotgun, struck up a conversation with Nina about non-traditional studenthood. The girlfriend also described her plans to adopt rabbits. She was sort of a rabbity woman.

We were exhausted by the time we arrived at the Best Western, but we managed to rally after checking into our room, and joined the gathering of Friends in progress on the floor below us in Dan and Maia's room. It was just like college all over again! We talked about circumcision and ate peanut butter-filled pretzel nuggets and drank whiskey.

We got up late on Saturday; everyone else'd moseyed off in search of food. There'd been talk of going to Cheap Charlie's, locally famous for the big pig statue on top of its sign. But it had moved, and nobody seemed to know the new address, and Ben and Tanya's kids needed to eat, so we settled on Newt's, a burger joint boasting the best burger in Rochester -- seven years in a row! -- but not much else, to my and KT's effete chagrin. Some of the members of our party were brave enough to try the "Juicy Lucy," and variants thereof, which consist of burgers that've been, uh, injected with or otherwise shaped around a molten core of yellow cheese. Good thing it's down the street from the Mayo Clinic? I know I'm not the first person to make that joke.

In the afternoon, the Best Western shuttle drove us up to the farm, where people were starting to gather for the ceremony. The family house was on top of a hill, on a road lined with drawered hives and bales of hay. Some vigorous-looking chickens roamed the driveway. I stalked one of them, a beautiful golden orange hen named Honey, under a bush while she made quiet, anxious -- and un-chickenlike -- hooting sounds.

The ceremony itself was brief. Ted and Cat stood behind the house, at the crest of hill overlooking some rolling fields. A string quartet played quietly. They exchanged vows. Some little girls sprinkled flower petals up and down the aisle. Afterwards, we carried folding chairs down the hill to the barn, where the reception was. The barn was enormous, sturdy, well-maintained; although it was unclear whether it had a function outside of being a home to a flock of swallows.

Tom, Dan, and Greg delivered the "funny" toast of the evening. In addition to drawing attention to Ted's most easily roastable aspects (e.g., gangles), they described the hat I'd bought him many years ago as, I think, a birthday present: I was working at the 'napse at the time, and, on a whim, I approached one of the enterprising gentlemen who'd set up "hat customization" businesses at tables outside our Broadway office, and asked for a hat with the words "Drunk Ted" on it in wildstyle graffiti. My intent was to make explicit the transformation Ted would undergo after a few drinks at a 680 Degraw party, often the subject of jokes: Drunk Ted was way more likely to tackle you, to do pratfalls, to tell you something that you didn't know about you. I was aiming squarely in the radius of "gag gift" -- who could imagine Oxford-shirted Ted sporting Marc Ecko-looking shit like that? But the hat caught on in a big way, and pretty soon you could expect Ted to be wearing it to indicate exactly who you were talking to at that point in the evening. Tom et al. explained, and then presented Ted with a new hat, red with black Sharpie, that proclaimed his new status.

The sun went down, filling the barn with golden orange light.

After dinner, we moved the tables and chairs out of the way, and the band set up their instruments at one end of the barn. A barn dance caller had been hired, and he explained the moves that we'd be required to do: I now know what it means to promenade, to do-si-do. After Ted and Cat danced their solo dance (to Wichita Lineman, I think?), there was a rollicking, compulsory group dance. I loved it! Although in typical fashion I wound up in the wrong places at various important junctures: On the women's side; turned the wrong way round; going under people's arms when I should have been going over. There were a bunch of little kids joining in the dancing, and at one point, during one of the partner-exchange phases, I wound up across from a little girl who looked absolutely horrified at the prospect of being my dance partner. I reached out to take her hand, but she bolted. That's okay, I thought. I'd be freaked out if I saw me coming at me across a dance floor. But I'd just been reading the bit in Shane MacGowan's book (rich and fascinating, by the way. The review that mentions his "deep knowledge and fathomless ignorance" sums things up pretty well) where he talks about the casual superiority of Irish dance -- in this case, "battering" -- and I did my best to stomp and jump and batter the hell out the barn floor. As I mentioned to Cat afterwards, I've never danced that much, nor had so much fun doing it, in my whole life.

On Sunday morning, after dancing the band out of the barn and then keeping things going with an iPod and some speakers (Intergalactic Pla-ne-tary!) we woke up extra early and hopped the Best Western shuttle back to the Ward farm, where we'd been promised a spectacle: A family friend of the Wards had about a dozen buckets of half-fermented groundfall apples that he planned to feed to the bison, and we were invited to observe. We helped hoist some of the buckets, which smelled clean and dirty and sweet at the same time, off the bed of his pickup truck and down to the electric fence by the barn. We tipped them over the edge of the fence, creating a sort of moat of stinky apples, and then the guy made a sort of whooping call; after a few moments, a small herd of bison came trotting up over the horizon and down the hill towards us. We'd been told their hooves would sound like thunder, but it was quieter than that. What was impressive was how quickly they stopped as they reached the fence and started to chomp on the apples. True to form, Hans -- the farm's stud, the only adult male they keep around from season to season -- was front and center, getting first pick. But there were some notable cows and second-string males: One bison with extremely moist and inflamed-looking conjunctiva (do bison have those?) whom we named "Fly Eyes." Another bison, an older male, hung back from the rest of the herd, only venturing to taste the apples once the others had trotted back over the hill and out of sight. "What's his deal?" I asked Ted. Ted squinted and looked off towards the woods in the distance. "Something ain't right about that one," he said.

And then it was all over (for us, at least). Tom and Colleen drove us to the Rochester Int'l airport, where we all got on a tiny plane back to Chicago. Tom and Colleen were sitting right behind us. We all leafed through the SkyMall catalog and tittered over the chintzy offerings. Tom, who'd flown Chicago-to-Rochester on Wednesday, asked the flight crew if this was the only plane making that flight; it was. He searched the seat pockets, to no avail, for a notebook he'd lost on the trip out. Colleen split off to hop a flight to Colorado, where yet another wedding was in the works (the two of them will have attended five fucking weddings by the end of the summer), and Nina and Tom and I picked up some oily-looking deep-dish personal pizzas and hustled onto the flight back to LaGuardia.

After we got back that afternoon, it rained torrential. I sat on the couch, feeling unexpectedly sad: End of childhood, end of summer. End of drunk Ted? We'll see, I guess.