Kristen & Phillip’s Wedding
I was able to get away from school for the weekend to attend my little brother’s wedding in Chicago. It was fantastic. I must say without any bias, the Driskill boys and their wives throw the best, most beautiful, most fun weddings. It speaks to my parents’ success in imparting positive, wholesome values in their sons without a lot of the dogmatic, ritualistic bullshit. Both of my coupled siblings tailered their weddings to be rich with personal meaning and adhered to the basic reasons for having such a ceremony. Interesting to me that while each wedding stood strongly on their spiritual understanding of God and the tradition of marriage, neither brother chose to be married in a church building.
Phil’s wedding took place at a Pavilion off of South Lake Shore Drive. It was an incredible open-air building that looks out over Lake Michigan. The weather was overcast, just grey enough to be surreal but not gloomy. The pastor of Phil’s church performed the ceremony with an equal amount of participation from his wife. Kristen, who always looks nothing short of stunning, was especially radiant in her wedding dress, and Phil beamed in his off-white three-piece suit.
After the wedding there were a few toasts, by Kristen’s sister, her father, Chris (Phil’s best man), my dad and Nathan and (finally) myself. I might not be “old” yet but I have enough life experience to have learned this: there are very few moments when our feelings for loved ones can be appropriately and meaningfully proclaimed, and to let them pass unheeded is something very much like a sin. I don’t remember exactly what I said because it’s difficult to speak on the fly, but it went something like this:
When I was twelve, Nathan and I were inside studying and Phillip was outside playing by himself. He fell out of a tree and broke his leg. To this day he’s the only one (of us three brothers) who has fractured a limb, and for the months that followed where he hobbled around in a cast was amazed by his resiliance. When I was twenty seven, Phil casually told me stories of how he and his friends would “ride the rails”during high school summers, hopping into boxcars and riding for hours as stowaways out of town, then hopping another train back in the opposite direction to take them back home. I was (and still continue to be) amazed by his daring, care-free approach to experiencing life. When I was six, Mom and Dad came into the playroom to ask Nathan and me what we thought about having a new baby brother. I was apprehensive to say the least. There was no way at that time for me to know how much I would come to look up to my younger brother of seven years, one of the most incredible persons I have ever met in my entire life (aside from myself, of course). Likewise, none of us could be happier that he was bringing into our family such a beautiful, talented, lovable young woman, and needless to say after five years of dating it was about freakin’ time!
Of course I wasn’t as perfectly articulate as that in my delivery on the spot. There were a few moments where I choked up a little, but it was spoken from the heart and I got my point across. Afterwards as it got dark I danced my two year old nephew and sister-in-law and cousin and I think everyone had a really good time.
It was difficult to leave school at this point in the summer, less than a week away from my Final Review with still so much to get done between now and Saturday. But without question these happy family memories are worth any amount of stress that might build up from taking a few days off.
