The wedding was really, really nice.

Something I only talk about every now and again is how I travel through life mentally. I feel I have a very tenuous grip on reality in that I am almost wholly unable to believe in any kind of permanence. Partly this is just my extremely existential personality asserting itself; mostly, it's that I've been at the receiving end of a lot of disappointments in my life and I guess I gave up a long time ago, not necessarily consciously, on counting on anything.

I think my memory reflects this; it's vague, foggy, and not unlike an ephemeral gauze on which are painted images from my past. If there's no wind or if I'm consciously smoothing the gauze out then the images come into view, but on the whole I lose track of what's behind me as the gauze twists and bends and flows in my wake. This isn't a bad thing, and really, aside from not being able to remember names for the first while when meeting new people, I can't complain. It's just the way my mind works, and I've come to accept it.

This makes traversing places and sentiments from my past a very, very odd experience for me.

The wedding was beautiful, make no mistake. A lot of dresses I've seen lately (as I've been linked by many friends somewhere in the thralls of marriage planning) have been downright hideous, the evil stepchildren of rotten imaginations. Heather's was just lovely, with the torso part almost like a stylized corsette. (I don't think any of the pictures show the back, but it was my favorite part.) But the wedding and reception were not, in and of themselves, the entire adventure. Going back to Jersey for me usually entails a trip to visit the relatives in Pennsauken, which holds little history for me personally and, with many relatives having passed, fewer and fewer people to visit these days. Lake Hiawatha, on the other hand, was my childhood before my childhood, the place from which my personality took its first few seeds and let them grow. Walking through it is always like walking through my gauze memories overlaying places that were once familiar but which now hold different visages.

This church is where Heather was married. It sits on the same lot as my first elementary school (I started there in pre-kindergarten at the age of three), a rectory, and the convent in which the nuns who run the school live.

Looking at it from the outside I almost didn't recognize it, because the last time I'd seen it up close was around my ninth birthday. I was an altar server there. I also sat with Heather on a curb one day, many lifetimes ago, when a wrecking crew came to demolish the old church what once stood on the same grounds.

The priest who married her was our old family priest, hardly changed at all by the fourteen or so years it's been since last we met, still a bright light and a vibrant life, still the same man (one of three) who inspired a younger me to want to become a man of the cloth. The altar and the tabernacle and the hymnal books, nothing had changed.

Nothing had changed.

In some ways that was comforting. In other ways it couldn't help but make me wonder: who would I be now, had I stayed? Bollocks and damnation, these aren't thoughts for the now. So let it be said that the wedding was beautiful. I had a wonderful time, and it's good to see someone so deeply a part of my past gaining a life, a path, that will make her happy. Congratulations, Heather. I hope that the rest of your life with Erik has as few clouds in its sky as did the day of your wedding.

One of the reasons I always loved Fathers Flannigan, David, and Paul was that they all of them had interesting homilies. Generally there was always at least one thought, one true ponderance you could pocket and mull over until Sunday next, and this time was no different; between all the well-wishing, joviality, and praying Father Flannigan did during his time at the podium, he slipped in a very interesting line: "I won't trouble you with the details of how they met, for as friend I'm sure you're all well-aware of the story; what is important is that they met." It resonated with me so strongly that I wrote it down, as I'm often wont to do with things that inspire me. I'm not sure why it resonated so strongly, not yet, but I'm sure I'll find the words.

I read Neil Gaimann's Coraline last night. When you pick it up ignore every word on the cover and just start on page one; if you do you'll be rewarded by a very nice little story. It's much darker than I expected. It doesn't dethrone Alice's Adventures in Wonderland or Francesca Lia Block's Echo from their spots as the books I never leave home without, but it's certainly something which belongs on the shelf in any house worth entering.

I'm typing this on the plane from Philly back to Toronto, and the turbulance is making my life flash before my eyes (you who know me know how much I hate to fly), so I'll sign off here for this to be posted later.

... and I landed with incident. How many planes have you been on that tilted up at the last minute before landing because another plane was on the runway? One more picture. It's the teeter-totter I used to ride on when I was about four or five. We'd try to make it come down hard because it'd absolutely rock us to the very bones when it did.