I am getting ready for a wedding this weekend…calm down, ladies, I’m not the one walking down the aisle. The Trev-meister is still on the market, and everything must go. Do I hear one hundred dollars? Fifty? Five? A buck fifty and a lovely set of steak knives?

Well, I am headed to a wedding this Saturday, where two of my college friends are tying the knot. The bride and groom live in Abbeville, which provides me with the opportunity to answer that decades-old question “where in the world is Abbeville?” (Apparently you head to Anderson and take a right). The occasion of festivities gives me a good excuse to plunder the recesses of my brain for other times where I’ve been present for the exchanging of vows (sometimes minus the shotgun or any other firearms keeping the groom from hightailing it out of there).

The first wedding that I can kinda sorta remember is my uncle Tony and aunt Donna’s, though to be honest I’m having a hard time recalling it. Must be all the drugs I’ve done over the years…I mean, the natural memory loss that can occur with those about to reach thirty years of age. Anyway, there is photographic evidence that I was there: in the wedding portrait with all the family gathered around the happy couple, I’m standing up front in a polo shirt and green dress pants, looking off in some other direction than the one where the cameraman is at. Maybe I’d sampled the “wedding punch” after my uncle Don spiced it up with some vodka, I can’t be sure. All I know is that I have no idea why anyone would force their child to wear green pants, even in the Eighties.

My next, and slightly more memorable, nuptials occurred at my church one Sunday after the service. Our church had two little people as members, and they both decided to avoid the comic gold of marrying a much taller person and instead end up together. I don’t think the wedding was listed in the bulletin, but the preacher did ask us to stay after the service if we wanted to. Due to my abiding interest in little people, and my grandmother being my ride and not ready to leave, I watched the little guy stand at the front while the little lady came down the aisle (well, our church had pews right in the middle of the room, so she had to come down at an angle), and the two were just so cute as they stood before the much taller preacher. Of course, years later Tom Cruise divorced his diminutive wife and wed the towering Katie Holmes, but that day he truly seemed happy amongst his own kind.

The third and most memorable wedding was that of my cousin Zeke to his wife Lisa, back about five years ago. Lisa was a few months pregnant with her first kid, so apparently she and Zeke were “living in sin” (as my sister pointed out jokingly). The perks of this wedding were that I was old enough to both hook up with a lonely bridesmaid and (having a hotel room to myself due to a relative not showing up at the last minute) having somewhere to drink beer away from the disapproving glare of my family. As is often the case, of course, neither really worked out for me: all the bridesmaids had boyfriends, and the middle-of-nowhere county where the wedding took place was dry. But it was a beautiful ceremony nonetheless, until the wedding DJ tried to channel his inner Steve Perry and mangle “Faithfully” while Lisa and her dad shared a dance. His efforts to get us dancing wild and crazy were met with puzzled looks and awkward silences. We’re not exactly a dancing kind of family.

So now I look forward to this upcoming wedding not because I think I’ll be able to imbibe or hook up with one of the bridesmaids (though those possibilities do exist in the back of my mind) but because weddings are a nice way to put aside all the nonsense of modern everyday life and just take a day to see cheesy, cliché-ridden optimism actually be fulfilled by two people desperately in love. Plus, it gives me an excuse to use my fancy shoes for something other than killing bugs, which reminds me that I need to clean those before Saturday. But mostly it’s about the “two people in love” part…oh, and the chance to see if this wedding DJ is as creepy as the last guy.

At any rate, congratulations to Brandon and Erin, and may you have an awesome wedding day.