Weird Wedding Music

The Big One just came downstairs with her Mom and 'The Quote of the Day': "That's weird wedding music, but I have weird parents."

First, let me say: Our wedding didn't last this far into the album -- The Beastie Boys instrumental CD called The In Sound From Way Out.

Next, I will say: The song she was referring to is actually a little weird, but the rest of the album is jazzy and funky and fit us perfectly at the time.

Also, all parents are weird.  It's caused by having children.

The girls were looking through our wedding album earlier.  After they went upstairs to give themselves baths I looked through the pictures from that day, this day, thirteen years ago and wondered: Is that us?

We're at a scenic overlook in the desert just west of Vegas, being married by the Reverend Julie Nourish.  Yeah, nourish.  I remember asking my Fiance (at the time), "Is that her stage name?"  Some Harleys pulled in and a pack of leather-clad bikers walked around behind our ceremony.  It was a bizarre wedding, but we were adults and we were getting married for us.

I laugh when I look through the pictures.  I'm getting cactused in every one.  Seriously.  Every one.

"It's a Joshua tree," my Wife always says, and it is, but it is either sticking out of or poking into my head in every picture from our wedding album.  All of them.

I go through the pictures and I say, "Look, I'm getting cactused in this one.  This one, too.  Yep.  Yep, cactused again."  There is one where I am in profile and the cactus is sticking out of my head and halfway down my spine like I'm a well-groomed dinosaur in a tux.

As I page through the pictures I remember the Beastie Boys playing jazz from the boombox on top of our rented limo.  I remember the opening of the fourth song, POW, where the volume picks up and our entire wedding party scrambled to turn the music down.

Everything after that has been a blur.  The apartments and jobs, the friends and vacations, the children and the trips to see family, the sad times and the joy, it all blends together and here we are.  Even the Beastie Boys are men now, grayed and worldly.