Till Death Do Us Part

I pulled into a parking space and turned to my wife and sister (NOTE: even though my wife is from West Virginia, I am not, and therefore she and my sister are in fact different people).

"I want to apologize in advance in the event a bolt of lightning strikes as soon as I walk into the church," I said. They nodded, affirming the likelihood of such a smoting.

The architecture of the building was beautiful, a Catholic cathedral situated right in downtown Akron. I know, downtown Akron is not much of a selling point, but you have to trust me on this one. The inside was very nice, and the stained-glass windows kept the reality of its location at bay.

Now I mentioned this was a Catholic cathedral, so that means it was a Catholic wedding. For those of you who are unfamiliar with the tenant s of Catholicism, this requires a full mass before the actual wedding. Minimum run time of 45 minutes. I am a recovering Catholic (went to Catholic school grades 1-7), so I wanted to challenge myself by seeing how much of the rote memorization of the Catholic mass I remembered. Plus I want to see how many times I can use the word "Catholic" in this paragraph. It turns out, quite a lot. Catholic.

If you haven't noticed from my writing, I have a short attention span and an over-active imagination. My thoughts turned to the walls, upon which many things were written. One of these things read "Joseph, pray to Jesus for us" and all I could think was "Damn, that's lazy. Can't even take the time to pray yourself, have to ask someone else to do it for you?"

The priest actually had a good homily, but I couldn't stop thinking about how his squinty eyes looked like Mr. Magoo without his glasses.

The bride and groom wrote their own vows, and they were very good. They were also long. The groom went first, talking about the first time they met. When the groom flipped his paper over and kept reading from the back, an image crept into my mind of him standing there in paper up to his knees ("And then on our sixteenth date..."). Honestly, though, he made a lot of people cry (in a good way). Of course, I was not among those numbers. My mind was already wondering elsewhere.

The most precious part of the wedding was when the priest said, "Frodo, the ring."

At least that's what I heard him say. Everyone else may have heard something completely different.