A wedding

Our youngest son Patrick blew into town on Thursday this past week since he was in the wedding party for yet another friend’s nuptials. The groom was Tommy and the bride was named Shannon. She had a little trouble breaking into the group of friends that has been hanging out together since high school, but Patrick reports that she has gained more acceptance now. He said the friends were originally skeptical since Tommy and Shannon met on line on a site called match.com. They bought a house together a while ago, and now they have made everything official.

It was a nice wedding ceremony, especially since Patrick shaved his Taliban beard for the occasion. Kathy and I went to the church and later to the reception. The party was held in the same hall that we had had our parish’s 75th anniversary dinner, so I already knew the food would be terrible. That was OK, though, since we had a good table of people including one of Patrick’s friends and his mother, and the parents of yet another one of Patrick’s friends. It took them three hours to get to the bride and groom’s first dance, so we didn’t linger for much longer after that.

A lá my father, I took some photos at the 2:00 p.m. ceremony, came home and downloaded them to my computer, digitally enhanced the ones that needed some adjustment, printed off copies for Patrick’s friends, and delivered them to the photo subjects at the 6:00 p.m. reception. Everyone was duly impressed and grateful. To be fair, though, dad used to develop his own black and white photos, so he didn’t have the turnaround time I do.

Patrick brought another birthday present for Max—a Transformer. We thought that was kind of fun because Transformers were the big thing when our boys were growing up, and they have made comeback lately. Today we were talking about where to go for lunch, since Patrick has to fly back this afternoon. Max piped up with “I know a great vegetarian place!” So that was where we went. There was a twenty minute wait, though, so we left to go a different restaurant, a place known for its burger—and yes, they did have a veggie variety.