The Wedding Day

Good Friends
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Morning:  Adventures in Dallas area traffic.

We met Dad & Liz at a restaurant about 1/4 mile from here for brunch.  The 1/4 mile, however, took us into the massive mall of yesterday's adventures with traffic.  Sunday  morning at 10, there were no police managing traffic flow, so getting to the restaurant was quite simple.  (The reason the car was involved, actually, was that I made a run to David & Michele's house to see if David was still planning on coming--he thought last night. I telephoned, but his cell phone was turned off.  I went to the house to ring the bell [nobody home]; Tim, sensibly, walked to the restaurant and met me there.  The car would turn out to be a problem, as you shall see!)

If you imagine a whole roomful of people who never met an inhibition they couldn't do without, you're on the right track.

Happy Couple
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Breakfast was very nice; La Madeleine is a chain, evidently, but more upscale than someplace like Denny's.  Good food.

After brunch, there was a good bit of hemming and hawing about what to do with the four hours before wedding activities needed to commence, all of which resulted in no decisions being made.  I needed a pair of tennis shoes (having packed numerous pairs of socks but no tennis shoes, and so had nothing to do any kind of walking in), so Tim and I wandered off to the Foot Locker at the edge of the next section of giant mall up.  Dad and Liz headed off to their hotel.  When we came out, armed with shoes--much cheaper than expected--and got in the car to go back to our hotel, the fun began.  From front section of giant mall where La Madeleine is, one cannot turn left to go back to the light to go back to the hotel 1/4 mile away.  So rather than that, I went around to the back, hoping to find an exit on the other street.  No dice. I did, however, find Dad and Liz, who were also driving around the parking lot looking for a way out.  It turned out we had to drive about a half mile in the parking lot before we got to an exit that would allow us to go back south, rather than shooting us further north--directly away from where we wanted to go.  (By this time, there were still no police, but there were cones, and there were hundreds of cars vying for position in the giant mall parking lot.)  Where we eventually ended up, one could make a left-hand turn to go south, BUT there was no traffic light, and some minutes passed before it was actually possible to make that left-hand turn across four lanes of traffic without getting killed.  Totally insane.

Newly Married
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We hid in the hotel room reading the rest of the afternoon, not having the nerve to venture back out into the Sunday afternoon heat and traffic anywhere we might have wanted to go.  We briefly considered the Fort Worth Botannical Garden, but the prospect of wending through the traffic on the winding roads there recalled all too vividly the recent actual experience of the mall, and we decided to punt.

Afternoon:  Adventures in Dallas Area Traffic  (There is a theme here...)

The Rings
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According to my mapping software, it would be 12 minutes from the hotel to the restaurant where the wedding would take place.  We scoffed at the idea that one can get ANYWHERE in 12 minutes--it having taken 20 minutes to get from the La Madeleine to our hotel in the morning--so we left a half-hour.  All went reasonably well--just every day average garden variety dodging of morons-until we got to within about a quarter mile of the restaurant (we just needed to continue north on the bridge across I-30 and then make an immediate turn into the restaurant parking lot) when we encountered CONSTRUCTION.  We had just passed the new and improved (?!?) Dallas Cowboy football stadium (David calls it Moonrise--this picture gives you NO idea of scale.  The thing DWARFS the Ballpark at Arlington right behind it), and rang bang into what turned out to be massive construction to revamp all the roads leading to the Moonrise in anticipation of the even more massive amount of traffic that will be streaming in there on 10 Sundays a year.

Nuptuaria glitteralis
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The upshot was that there was no way across 30.  We had to turn east on the frontage road--directly the wrong way--and all the crossovers were closed for several miles.  We ended up taking a 5-mile detour to go the last 1/4 mile.  We were the last people to arrive at the restaurant, and they started as soon as we walked in the door.  To be fair, we did make it right on the dot of 5.  Good thing we gave ourselves nearly three times as long as it was supposed to take--this is a good rule of thumb for going anywhere in the greater Dallas area.

Wedding Favors
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The wedding itself (wedding celebration, to be exact; the actual legal marriage took place on July 5 without ceremony) was very simple, just the exchanging of vows and a blessing, but also sincerely felt and very nice.  Was that just a little tear I felt there while I was looking through my camera lens???

The event was held in Piccolo Mondo restaurant in Arlington.  They have a lovely private room, the food was good, and the service was excellent--very unobtrusive.  The picture here gives you an idea of the decor.  There was a choice of several entrees; I had a quite delicious Chicken Alfredo.  The minister doubled as the formal photographer, and there was Tiramisu for dessert, instead of wedding cake.  There was no formal cutting of the Tiramisu, I might just say, but I didn't hear anyone complaining; I believe they were all too busy wolfing it down.

Powell Males
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One important part of the proceedings consisted of trying to determine the last time anyone saw David in a tie.  David suggested that I had NEVER seen him in a tie, but that is not correct, because he wore a tie at my wedding.  He attempted to argue this point, claiming that he has a photo of himself on that day and he isn't wearing a tie; however, he was voted down by the rest of those who were present.  We reminded him that he walked me down the aisle and he was wearing a quite spectacular tuxedo (specially imported from Kentucky) with a morning coat and an ascot.  He didn't remember, but conceded the point.  I shall have to send him a picture. Apparently, he had to wear a tie to work in 1983 when he worked at a hotel, but none of us saw him in that, so the ONLY time anyone could affirm having seen him in a tie before was our wedding, 8-6-88, more than 21 years ago.  Speaks to the import of the event!

Toast from the Best Man
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His shoes were a different matter:  for his wedding, he was wearing what Michele called "Big Boy Shoes"--black leather dress shoes.  As none of us could actually remember what shoes, if any, he was wearing at our wedding, we couldn't vouch for having seen him in anything similar before.

The rest of the event is about what you would expect, given the family dynamics.  Consider first of all that there were three Powells gathered together in one spot, along with three people who get the Powell idea of humor well enough to marry it, and that gives you some idea of the level of irreverence.  I could easily have anticipated that.  What I could not have anticipated was that the non-Powells in the room not only gave the Powells a run for their money in terms of irreverence, but quite possibly actually surpassed us.  If you think that's not possible, allow me to give you just one example:  when the minister said to David and Michele "It's time," Dad said (to David or Michele?  It wasn't clear!) "Last chance to call it off."  This caused a good deal of hilarity, but not nearly so much hilarity as when, at the end of dinner, the conversation turned to fond remembrances of bike club experiences and we were treated to a quite graphic account of one man's acquisition of poison ivy in what must be considered as a serious candidate for the most unfortunate area of the body to acquire poison ivy.  The account was short and made no attempt to avoid the crass.  More hilarity ensued.

Toast from the Maid of Honor
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If you imagine a whole roomful of people who never met an inhibition they coudn't do without, you're on the right track.  We were treated to conversation about a list of words that should never be said in public (which of course entailed the identification of at least some of those words), the natural history of Michele's involvement with men (that was in the toast from her best friend), a catalog of David's more eccentric personality traits (that was in the toast from his father, who did, to be fair, admit that David got them all, including a propensity to mumble, from him), and a large dollop of what might have been called innuendo, except that there wasn't very much subtle about it.  In short, this was my kind of crowd.

Ribaldry and sardonic commentary aside, this was really a nice occasion.  David and Michele are two people who have had, each in his or her own way, quite difficult and lonely lives, and the fact that in their upper 40's they each found someone who understands and accepts and loves is a real joy.  You can probably see from the pictures how happy they are together, and that happiness was appreciated and shared by those present.  I got the sense, even though I didn't know them, that all the people there were genuinely and generously happy for David and Michele; not just enjoying the spectacle and not likely to go home and make snide remarks later.  A lovely occasion, easily worth all the traffic Dallas could throw at us.