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an excerpt from our wedding (fyi, yesterday was our 3 month anniversary):

“…there’s no denying the fact that marriage ranks right up there with birth and death as one of the three biggies in the human safari. It’s the only one, though, that we’ll celebrate with a conscious awareness. Very few of you remember your arrival and even fewer will attend your own funeral. You pick a society, any society: Zuni, Nudembo , Pennsylvania Dutch. What’s the one thing that they all have in common? Marriage. It’s like a cultural handrail; it links folks to the past and guides them to the future.”

(some of you may recognize this more accurately as an excerpt from a monologue by chris stevens, the clergyman and radio DJ of northern exposure fame)

i went to masaka with astrid on saturday to attend sister’s daughter’s wedding. no doubt - marriage is the cultural handrail. sure, we may be 1/2 way round the world, but the bride’s still in white. it was a fun day - granted i was a little overwhelmed by all the sherbet green worn by the 11 bridesmaids, but i was relieved that astrid talked us out of having to sit in the “honorary” seats up front and eventually my butt did regain feeling after having gone numb from sitting in hard church pews for 3.5 hours (2 hour ceremony + 1.5 hour delay). and, since the entire ceremony was in luganda, i had lots of time to think about my own wedding…

one of the things i just cannot get over when remembering our wedding is knowing that everyone was there because of us. so many of our loved ones, all of these amazing people…in one place…because of us. when else will that ever happen? this realization caught me by surprise during the ceremony. it gave me momentary stage fright, then i started to cry, then sethG saved me because he started talking about accepting money to get us to take our clothes off on stage. which reminds me, phil & i realized later that neither one of us remember anything from the first minutes of the ceremony. nothing, nothing at’all. the excitement, adrenaline, thrill wiped away all cognition except the feeling of being here doing this together. 101paige