Attending My First Wedding In The Snow Was A Shivery Marvel

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It started at the airport. Nearing my gate, I saw a group crowded around a cell phone held high in the air — everyone video-chatting with someone on the other end.

“Hey, Dudley!” a little boy said to the phone, “You want to see my Mario socks?”

I thought, Is that my Dudley? Could it be the same one?

I merged with the group because give me one reason not to talk to strangers — and good luck with that. “Is that my Dudley?” I asked. Then I stuck my head around the hand holding the phone to peer into the screen. It was her. I burst out laughing.

“Dude!!” I said, because that’s what she calls everybody, and we call her. The party had already started there in the airport.

Dudley is the nexus between a lot of people and plenty more. She’s a loud magnet who laughs like a cyclone as robustly as she tears up like a great humane sorrow. She was my oldest son’s soccer coach for years, my boss, and now a permanent member of the Rovers Middle-Aged Soccer Mom Association — a group dedicated to dancing to a Spotify playlist in someone’s kitchen every couple of months.

We were convening like a massive convention to celebrate Dudley’s marriage to Barb, the woman who will — in my expert opinion — require a supply of earplugs for the rest of her life.

We flew to Knoxville from the far stretches of the country because we’d not miss this for anything. And smart we were. We had no idea in the airport, as flights were delayed or canceled due to snow — as we sat in our sprawled huddles, chatting and laughing like it was an Olympic sport — that the wedding would be far more an experience than we’d figured.

The first inkling was when word got out that the ceremony would be outside. This news coincided with the other news — Knoxville, TN had a Winter Storm Warning set in place. All this news swirled while a third of the 100+ guests shifted and lounged in a northern Virginia airport for hours, flip-flopping from gate to gate while their departure times extended.

Would this wedding be one for the history books? Historians are busy writing their first drafts.

By the time we landed in TN, roads were slick, evergreens were stacked with icy white fluff, and temps were brrrr. This was cause for excitement: I love snowy days. But this wasn’t any snowy day. It was the coming together of boys-now-men I hadn’t seen in many years, of Dudley’s family I’d never met but always wanted to, of friends I love, and of two fiancees who had the foresight to bring us all together in the neighborhood where Dudley grew up — the edge of Maryville College campus.

Luckily, the pre-wedded also had the foresight to purchase last-minute, freak-out, uh-oh blankets for the 100+ attendees to cower under in their chairs set out along a wooded path for the ceremony in the unexpected snow.

We cowered, but we also took photos, cried, and watched as Bruni the dog walked Dudley down the aisle to meet Barb. I’ve been to many weddings and never attended one like this. It wasn’t so much the dog — I assume dogs have walked people down wedding aisles before. It wasn’t so much the snowy setting — I assume this must have happened somewhere, sometime. It was what happened throughout the two-day event that showed me how special love in all its forms can be.

First, the collection of people from around the country, all walks of life, and various connections to the newlyweds, melded together like we’d been family all along. We shared stories with strangers as we served ourselves snacks and drinks from the tables spread around the estate where the wedding was located. The strangers were different from us and the same — in other words, family. We all loved the two people we were there to support — family.

We danced like nuts — to be honest — with dancers ranging in age from five years old to fairly wrinkled but grooving. It was one big family on that dance floor — one five-year-old breakdancing with the rest of us shimmying in opposition to the ligaments — all of us collectively celebrating good people who wanted to make their love official.

(Remember, Barb, don’t forget the earplugs.)

The adults who captivated me most were kids I’d known long ago. They were grown. They weren’t in soccer cleats. They were taller than me and had girlfriends and jobs. They sat at a dinner table together which the old soccer parents glanced at as we chatted with misty eyes. There we all were — younger adults about to take on the world and older ones about to relinquish it to them.

As the years tick off, I watch my past slowly fade away — the memories linked to people, both of which seem out of reach sometimes. Once enough time passes, it’s as if I lose access to those who made my life what it was so long ago.

But Time isn't so smart. It thinks it can drag me down the dark alley of sad nostalgia every time I walk around the bend of the forest of my life and see its history, so far away on a precipice, about to fall into oblivion.

Nope. Not after a wedding like this. This wedding, which threw me to the ground in a state of exhaustion when I arrived home, is proof that our past is still alive in our present and a maker of happiness. This wedding was for the attendees as much as for the betrothed. It was for the present as much as the past. That wild weekend in Tennessee was for the connection of time to strangers to family to love--and all of it to the future.

But maybe it was mostly for Bruni.

I have the wedding cocktail napkin sitting like a relic on my desk. It features an image of Bruni, the dog from Virginia who traveled to Tennessee to walk his owner down the aisle to meet his other owner. This is the same Bruni who sat on a dog bed at his owners’ feet while they did some kind of official-sounding business in front of a bunch of humans swaddled in blankets in the snow. This Bruni was the one who still can’t figure out why people do what they do — namely, marry in front of a field of plaid blankets when they could marry in front of, say, central heating.

But this Bruni , I’ll bet you anything,  is lounging right now in his Virginia home, atop a dark blue blanket, the same one I have draped on my legs now as I recall what an extraordinary experience it was to attend a wedding in the snow.

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Hope you're staying warm, my friends.