2016 is not going to be “one for the ages,” unless you are referring to the dark ages. It’s been a grim year in a lot of ways, so it feels a little strange to be saying nice things about a lousy year. There have, however, been a couple of really fantastic things, and they’re what I’m going to remember when I think back on this year.
The lesser of the two is that my beloved Leicester City football club won the English Premier League. I won’t say much about this other than that the odds of the Chicago Cubs winning the World Series were nowhere near as long as those against my Foxes winning the title.
Of vastly greater importance is that I married Nicole last month. I occurs to me that I wrote a great deal about the honeymoon, but I haven’t had much to say to about the wedding. Part of that is that weddings are a lot like comets approaching perihelion*. There’s a long, slow planning and organizing phase during which Nicole, to my everlasting gratitude, did most of the heavy lifting. As the event gets closer, things start to move faster, picking up speed exponentially, until the actual ceremony, which flies by so quickly so scarcely have time to notice.
At least, for me, that’s how it was.
Pictured: Time both flying and standing still.
Looking back, though, it was a lot of fun. We had a terrific turnout. Dear, dear friends from all over the country and as much of my family as could make it were in attendance. Patrick performed the ceremony and he was absolutely perfect in the role and really ought to think about this sort of thing for a living. I cannot possibly thank him enough, although it’s going to be fun to try.
Working in a Doom Patrol reference at my request.
I’m going to leave the rest of the names out for fear of omitting someone, but I want to thank everyone who made the trip and shared the day with us. I hope everyone enjoyed the party as much as I did. We had a psychic, a face painter, a lobster roll truck, a disco ball, a bartender in Marie Antoinette costume (have a mentioned that this was a costume-encouraged wedding?), a “midway” with games, cardboard stand-ups for photos, seriously creepy Halloween decorations (I’m talking about actual bat skeletons here, not Party Barn plastics), and nigh-perfect weather.
Not everything went perfectly, but none of that really mattered. The improvs went largely unnoticed and in some cases might have been an improvement. For example, we didn’t plan on playing this song for our first dance, but I’m pretty happy knowing it was. Besides, Lil Jon makes everything better.
I hope everyone had a great time. The wedding wasn’t just about us, as we were as committed as people can be. We wanted to share what we had with people we loved, and I think that came across. I get to live this kind of life every. single. day.
So, yeah, 2016 was a poor year, but I’m always going to have a least a few fond memories of it.
-RK
* Yes, I’ve used the exact same analogy to describe the pacing of a William Gibson novel. I like the imagery of it, and honestly, how often do you get to use a word as cool as “perihelion?”