table_11 raze it's pete's wedding day. not so long ago i would have been best man, or at least a groomsman. now i'm just a guest sitting nearest to the wedding party's table. doesn't matter. we're solid in the friendship place, always have been, always will be. that's all i care about. it's a beautiful hall. there's a chandelier i want to commit to memory and frame somewhere in my mind, all symmetrical dark gold, looking like an inaccessible staircase hung from the ceiling. i'll give it a black frame. the food is the best i've had at a wedding reception, and it's not close. even the coffee is good. table eleven is where i am. there's a guy i met once downtown, years ago, and his girlfriend or wife or partner in grudging two-way tolerance. he's friendly. she doesn't speak. she alternates between smiling and making a face like she's fighting off some bad gas. there's an older man i remember playing a concertina he made himself at a jam session at a friend's house, and his wife. he remembers me too. he talks about sailing and indian food and how he's worked his way down from twelve to seven on the ten point spicy scale. his wife is stuck at minus two. there's another guy with the same name as the guy i remember from some bar sometime closer to the beginning of the millennium. then kyle and his parents sit down. kyle was one of my best friends all through grade school. like peter. we made a good trio. but they went to the same high school as the rest of my grade school friends, and i went to a different high school where i knew no one, and i kept in touch with pete and lost touch with kyle and everyone else. i haven't seen or talked to him in more than half my life. as a man he looks the same as he did as a boy, but more defined. the sketch became a painting. i look very different. a different artist took over around the halfway point and made changes. he's not going to recognize me unless i say something, and my heart is biting hard and fast into my shoulder, and i want to say something but i don't know what to say. break the ice and maybe i drown. maybe i swim. maybe i freeze to death. i say hello. the ice melts. i swim. i talk to his parents. i talk to him. they're the most genuine people. he has a learning disability that made school difficult. i think it mostly had to do with reading and retaining information. his vision was limited then, and it's more limited now. his mother takes pictures of select photographs from the slideshow with her phone so he can see them. kyle doesn't always look at you when he talks to you. sometimes his eyes are above you or to your left, and you're not sure what he sees. but i think he sees as much or more than anyone else. i feel like a piece of shit for not staying in touch with him over the years. a really disgusting one you want to flush and forget and get the hell away from as fast as you can. i get his phone number from his father. i'll give him a call. maybe we'll get together. do something. remember the friends we used to be and never really stopped being. at another table out of shouting range i see gary and adam. they look just the same as they did before they could grow hair on their chests. before any of us could. i have a yearbook from grade five with gary's signature in it, and beneath it is his phone number, and beneath that in parentheses: "but don't call all the time, okay?" i never called him at all. i remember laughing hysterically when he stood in front of the class to read a story he'd written, and no one else laughed because the humour was very british and they didn't get it, but i couldn't stop, and he looked at me like he was embarrassed, like he wanted to say, "please stop laughing in the places you're meant to laugh," and all it did was make me laugh more. i have a cassette tape of him playing electric guitar very badly as part of a jam session in pete's parents' basement when we were high school freshmen. i remember him being standoffish that day, acting like i was beneath him and he didn't want to look at me when he talked to me. kyle is looking right at you even when he's looking somewhere else. gary's eyes didn't think i was worth their time that day. well fuck his eyes. i'm not saying hello to him or them. they can suck on someone else's face. peter claps me on the arm like thunder and blushes at kind words. you can tie a piece of string in a knot to get him and his new wife to kiss. i figure the more impressive and complex the knot, the more impressive and complex the kiss, but i don't ask about it. i leave the knots to the people who know how to tie them better than i do. parents and groomsmen and bridesmaids take turns giving prepared speeches. no one knows how close to hold the microphone to their mouth. all the speeches follow the same pattern. start with the funny stuff. hope people laugh. leave a little space at the end for the serious stuff. i feel bad for one girl who i think is the maid of honour, who gets up there and has to get through almost no one laughing at any of her jokes. if she were a comedienne, you'd say she's dying up there. she's not a comedienne. she's dying up there. all the speeches are written down, and still they're delivered without much clear conviction. no momentum. no power. the material is largely uninspired. how is it that no one can just stand up and speak from the heart? this is your friend. this is your surrogate sister. this is your son. say something that matters. say something you feel. i could get up there with nothing prepared and give a speech to shame all of you well-dressed people. i have things in my heart i know how to say. i don't need a piece of paper to tell me what they are. i don't need to read them to know they're there. the floor opens up. does anyone else want to get up and say something? my stomach is jelly. i don't know. maybe it's not my place. fifteen seconds pass and the opportunity is gone, and the bride and groom are speaking. thanks for the opportunity that wasn't really an opportunity at all, mister DJ. the speeches of the newlyweds redeem the speeches of the others. she sounds genuine. pete is hilarious without trying to be, and heartfelt in all the right places, because he's already those things every day of the week. the bride and groom dance, and the bride and her father dance, and pete has the DJ play skynyrd while he dances with his mother. that's so perfectly him i feel like cheering. i give him a grin when the song ends and he gives me another thunderclap when he walks by. and then the music gets a little too loud, i have no one to dance with, i'm not about to ask someone i don't know, and i have no reason to stay any longer. so i say my goodbyes. but i'm glad i went. i had a good time. i hope pete and his wife are happy for as long as they can be. i'll give him a call soon. we'll do some catching up. if i ever get married, no one who gives a speech is allowed to write down a goddamned thing. 131130 ... no reason i saw this before and felt the need to say something. a note (no pun intended) that just because someone reads from a piece of paper, it doesn't necessarily mean they're not speaking from the heart. when i made my maid-of-honour speech, i had a sheet of paper that reminded myself of things i wanted to say. i didn't use it because i didn't have anything to say about my best friend/almost-sister (quite the contrary; it was hard to narrow it down), but i get nervous making speeches and wanted to make sure i didn't forget anything. i used it as a reference, not as a script for a routine. it's lucky when people are able to make heartfelt speeches off the cuff or without a safety net, but a lot of people aren't able to do so. in any case, to each their own. but being put on the spot can do strange things to people. 131202 ... epitome of incomprehensibility I think there are general pros and cons to weddings and other sorts of formal events. On the good side, you can gather a lot of people in one place, there is food, and it's generally a happy occasion. On the bad side, since things like this are wrapped up in ritual, there's almost an expected artificiality. I mean, there's an expectation things go a certain way, perhaps backed up by social pressure and the difficulty of trying to please everybody. (Why is my writing so dry today? Maybe because the skin on my hands is dry. That must be it.) 131202 ... e_o_i In any case, to respond to real people saying real things, I agree that a) it was probably a good thing to go to this wedding and I bet Pete appreciated it and b) some people don't sound natural making speeches because it isn't easy for them - me, I guess it depends on the situation. (Still dry, with that a) and b) thing. I guess I need to put on more moisturizer.) 131202 ... raze i understand writing things down so you have a safety net, or because of nerves. but when the speeches people make are all about the supposedly funny things they and the groom did while drunk, and how they don't want child services called on them for bringing their son into bed with them for years so they wouldn't miss the baseball game when he was crying at night, and there's nothing at all in there that ever gets at any of the important things about who either of the newlyweds are, i don't think that's really speaking from the heart. that's a poorly-done roast. but i guess some people enjoy that sort of thing at their wedding. really, i just wrote down what was going through my head in the moment. 131202 what's it to you? who go blather from