Just as a reminder, this column is all about praising what is good. And a side note: I’m a humanities major.
In light of my focusing on the good, I want to talk about something really good that happened to me over the Christmas holidays. I got married. And let me tell you, marriage is way good. Everything from the wedding showers and the bachelor party to actually being married was and is amazing.
First of all, there are these really cool things called wedding registries. I don’t know who came up with this idea, but Bed Bath & Beyond has perfected it. You walk into the store, tell them you’re getting married, and they give you this scanner that allows you to shop without paying for anything. It’s simply amazing. Maybe not all guys would find shopping for cookware enjoyable, but I love to cook, so it was a blast.
Come to think of it, traditionally speaking, guys are kind of left out of the wedding shower scene. My wife had about a dozen wedding showers, and only one of them was designed for both of us to attend. So, while tradition is cool, I felt the need to do what a lot of guys are doing now – I added to the tradition. There’s no really effective name for this new tradition, so don’t laugh – I had a Man Shower. Guy Gathering, Tool Party, whatever you call it, it still sounds lame, but it’s not. Sears will actually let you register for tools, and I assume other hardware stores will do the same.
Anyway, my best man – who really lived up to his title – arranged for a bunch of guys to get together on a Saturday, eat food we grilled outside, and watch football. We had an award for the manliest-wrapped gift. One rancher/heavy machinery mechanic I know made a “gift box” out of 1/4″ sheet metal. It probably weighed 20 pounds. And guess what he put inside it? Lingerie. It was hilarious. Needless to say, he won the award.
Later on, my truly-the-best man threw a bachelor party for me. He had planned on kidnapping me while I was eating at a local restaurant – complete with ski masks and black clothes – but rainy weather delayed my arrival and that didn’t work out. All of us guys did eat out though, and then we camped out on a nearby ranch. My best man and another groomsman managed to buy a love seat from Goodwill and find a desk on the side of the road for us to douse with gasoline and burn. Combine some good pyrotechnics with cheap hotdogs and s’mores, and you’ve got one heck of a time.
Other great times included the rehearsal dinner and the reception. Seeing all of our friends and family was amazing. Seven friends from my old college came down for the weekend from as far away as Florida, Colorado, and Massachusetts. They also pooled their money (along with some other friends who couldn’t make the trip) to buy me a $200 blender. Talk about the perfect smoothie. Mmm.
All in all, it’s not the gifts themselves that made my wedding and the accompanying showers so amazing. This might sound cliché or hard to believe, but it was truly awesome to experience such generosity from people who I knew were going through hard financial times, with the economy as it is, and Christmas coming five days after our wedding. We were overwhelmed by cards, presents, and well wishes.
That’s what made our wedding so memorable – the community that was created around it. Even after the wedding, when people who didn’t even know us saw the various messages that my groomsmen painted on my truck – messages like “I have a hot wife,” “Honeymoon or bust,” “Bow-chicka-wa-wa,” and “Wa-wa-we-wa” – they would stop and take the time to tell me congratulations. So, in the end, my wedding not only sealed my relationship with my best friend but also allowed me to experience a lot of good things from a lot of good people. In risk of being overly sentimental, I want to say that getting married has allowed me to see some really cool things about humanity – and let me tell you, humanity is good.
Matt Brumit is a junior humanities major. He can be reached for comment at [email protected].
