Tripping out on the way to The Wedding (the Movie!)

Ok. So here I am playing around with iMovie. It's our trip to Chris and Tiffany's wedding. There will be more fun coming. Enjoy.

Tripping out on the way to The Wedding...

Ok. So we're supposed to be close to landing at D/FW airport at this moment.

Obviously The Wife and I aren't.

Instead we're sitting at home watching Game 2 of the Miami-Chicago NBA playoffs. Why you ask?

Take a look at the map (you can click it to make it bigger). The Wife and I are way over there on the left in San Jose. The pre-wedding festivities for our friends Chris and Tiffany (hereby listed as "The Couple" and the festivities listed as "The Wedding") are way over there on the right. In between: scary red boxes.

Those little red boxes were so scary that "The Folks that Make Decisions" at Mineta/San Jose International Airport rescheduled our flight there twice today. After the second delay, Sarah and I decided not to press our luck (the "Folks Behind the Counter" couldn't promise we'd make our connection). So we opted out for a flight early Wednesday morning in hopes of reaching "The Wedding" by early tomorrow evening. We'll see.

But the fun didn't stop at our rescheduling. When we asked about our checked luggage, the "Folks Behind the Counter" said to go to baggage claim, it would be 10 minutes.

It was two hours. Talk about a good start to the trip.

Wish us luck tomorrow. I promise pictures and stuff when we return.

And then there was a dance (Part 2)

Continued from Part 1. Catch up HERE (about half way down page).

FLASH

Her Mom expected her home by possibly noon. My Dad ordered me home by 1:30 a.m. … “And not one second later.” Both parents were serious. Her mother — either generous and very cool or weird and very dumb — lent us the keys to her shiny, new Ford Explorer so I could drive a group of our (her) friends to the nearest big town for a fancy (over-priced) pre-prom dinner. Meanwhile my parents allotted me an extra 30 minutes of curfew and the promise that my father would be sitting at the corner of our street in a lawn chair waiting for me if I missed the allotted time. He was serious. He’d done it before.

I parked my car in front of her large, beautiful home, paused for a moment, started to hyperventilate, caught my breath and then quickly made for her front door. Once there I paused for a moment, started to hyperventilate, caught my breath, looked at the slight reflection of myself in the door’s glass and then knocked gently on the pane. My heart was beating so fast I felt as though I would hurl on my black tuxedo. However, stomach acid would have clashed horribly with the cummerbund that matched the royal pinkness of her dress. Earlier my brother had joked that pink was for sissies. I agreed whole-heartedly, but didn’t remark back. I’d seen worse. My best friend was wearing some teal-purple vest under his jacket that with the addition of just the slightest bit of electric current, would have lit him up like the Las Vegas Strip.

Her mother came to the door with a smile on her face and a kind word or two about my monkey suit. I felt like a fraud, a child in my father’s clothes as she led me from a foyer filled with nice family portraits to a living room filled with very original art. The mother calmed my nerves slightly by saying her daughter was “still getting ready, but should be right down. Why don’t you sit?” So I planted carefully on the couch, trying desperately not to wrinkle my pants. Soon we were chatting about how wonderful fleeting moments like these were in life and how happy she was that her daughter had picked me to escort her to one of the most memorable nights of her life. I think she was quoting a poem of some kind, when the daughter appeared at the top of the stairs.

She was incredible. At that point in my young life I’d seen no one more beautiful. Still to this day, only two other moments have taken my breath completely away. But this was my first. She smiled, her long, dark hair pulled behind her head in a way that accentuated her always striking smile. Her makeup was that of a seventeen-year-old girl trying to look 25, but slightly beneath the foundation, the energy that always consumed her face shone through like a bright light. I struggled to cough, as my throat grew dry. I could not take my eyes away as she nearly floated down the stairs.

I was still staring, in a trance, when her mother spoke. She spoke again. The third time my trance was broken, because she raised her voice in an impatient way and asked the question: “Well … don’t you think she’s beautiful?”

I did. And to this day I still occasionally play this moment over in my head. I could have gone in so many different directions. However, my brain was truly paralyzed by the beauty before me. I reached and reached, searched and searched and tried desperately to clear the dryness from my throat. Then, after rubbing my neck with my hand, and then running it up my cheek and through my hair Christian-Slater style, I said the most offensive comment I could have conjured.

“She looks … very … nice.”

The breath the Mother took in sucked the life out of the daughter. Beautiful's eyes dropped for a second and the smile that beamed so bright turned down ever so slightly for just a touch of a moment. Then being the sweet, enduring person she always had been, her face lit back up and she said, “You look great.”

But I felt like ass.

FLASH [ stay tuned ]

We're coming back real soon...

So what's a blogger to do when he doesn't blog? I guess I should stop playing so much on Second Life and get going in real life.
Seriously. Anyway. Stay tuned. There are many more stories to tell. Much more to write. The internet is nothing without information. Right?
So, stay tuned.

Finally, a few words about England...

The wife and I recently returned from a must needed and well deserved “extended vacation” in Europe. I put quotes around that phrase because after five years of marriage we’ve learned that “extended vacation” actually means “visiting relatives on holidays.” You can imagine this tragic definition caused considerable laughter between us once we learned that the Brits call all vacations “holidays.”

While I’ll spare you any long-winded details of our trip, a couple of moments drew such rare inspiration that not mentioning them seems criminal. We spent a remarkable night on the grounds of Canterbury Cathedral surrounded by beauty and history I never imagined beyond reading Chaucer’s “Canterbury Tales” and T.S. Eliot’s “Murder in the Cathedral.” The gothic structure’s brown, aged walls are adorned with weatherworn statues of saints and martyrs and seem to reach up from ground as if to support the sky. Because we stayed on grounds, we were able to walk around the World Heritage site at night, those same walls lit only by the blue shading of moonlight.

Inside, the Cathedral became a living, breathing animal. Tourists and clergy moved about, inspecting rows of monuments, the enormous architecture and the sheer awe of a structure that has drawn pilgrimages to the site since medieval times. While I never claim to be the most ardent Christian, I was close to tears as I walked along the deep grooves worn into marble floor by ages and ages of pilgrims. And the stained glass, dancing by sunlight, filled the dark and amazing space with small touches of color and a sense that much-higher presence surrounded those gathered.

That night we attended a candlelit choral concert inside the cavernous chamber. Again I fought back tears as voices filled in the perfect acoustics of the holy structure. The emotions rendered that night, still linger.

Another moment I hope will always remain at easy recollection belongs to the Tate Modern, London’s newest art gallery. While I could spend several hours recalling the amount of precious art Sarah and I studied there (as well as at the National Gallery), one room brought me an incredible sense of harmony.

In the 1950s Mark Rothko was commissioned to paint a series of murals for the Four Seasons restaurant in New York City. The owners hoped that the color and brightness seen in his earlier work would be the perfect companion to their restaurant’s atmosphere. However, upon finishing the canvases, Rothko dropped out of the commission because the darker mood of the piece seemed unsuitable for the restaurant setting. The work now lives in a smallish room at the Tate that is surrounded by other pieces of his art, as well as several of Jackson Pollock’s better know pieces.

Once inside, enormous, dark canvases become the small room. With your back to the door, you are washed in what seems like such simple strokes, but by lingering longer, the deep complexity of the work presses into you. At first you feel a sense of claustrophobia, the type of anxiety that felt when embarking upon near-impossible tasks, but moments later the room transforms from tight space to infinite openness. Thinking back, the time I spent soaking in the canvases of maroon, dark red and black closely match the religious experience felt on our trip to Canterbury.