The blog is back after some technical difficulties and some serious slacking, and so much has happened that it could take months to fully catch up. First off, my brother got married, which is awesome. Mostly because it was him and not me. That’s not the only reason it was awesome, but the most important. So happy for him. For both of us, really.

Seriously, though, it was a big deal our family. There are just two of us, my brother Tony and I. We are both in our early 30s now and my mother was threatening to go Kramer vs. Kramer on us if someone didn’t get his life in order, stop being STUPID, stop living like COLLEGE STUDENTS, and get married as the Lord had intended five to six years ago.

Luckily, my brother lost Paper-Rock-Scissors, and so he is the one locked up in holy matrimony and I am still going to minor league baseball games on Tuesday nights at the last minute without asking a single person for permission. In all sincerity, he married a great girl from the Oklahoma panhandle and I have never seen him happier. He was headed to the Bahamas on a honeymoon, though, so it’s hard not to look happy in that scenario. I played the role of Best Man somewhat flawlessly, although pretty much the only duty was to hold on to a ring for about an hour. It was a dry wedding at a Mennonite church near Turpin, Okla., so there were no drunk relatives to watch. No dancing. And since part of the reception seating was outside and part was inside, I didn’t even have to give a speech. This was responsibility tailored for yours truly.

I did have two thoughts and these are the same two thoughts I’ve had about pretty much every wedding I’ve ever been to …

No. 1: Do flower girls or ring bearers ever do their jobs successfully?

My brother’s wedding had two flower girls. One wouldn’t even come down the aisle during the rehearsal, despite her mom herding at one end and her dad in his groomsman outfit cheering at the other. Not a good sign. The other was a prancer, head high, ready for the big stage. So of course on the day of the wedding, the shy girl wouldn’t budge and the other girl marched to the front of the church and then whispered to the Maid of Honor, “When do I drop the flowers?” So the rose petals stayed in the basket.

I get it, of course. You dress little kids up in grown-ups clothes and do their hair and everyone oohs and aahs, and the grandparents have minor, but possibly dangerous palpitations, and everyone goes home feeling a happy glow. It doesn’t really matter if the flower girl screws up. It’s sometimes cuter when they mess up. The shy flower girl from my brother’s wedding sat in the back for a while and then during the vows told her mom, “OK, I’m ready to go now.” That’s damn cute. No doubt about it.

But tell me this: Have you ever seen a flower girl/ring bearer scenario that went smoothly? And yet we’ve all seen weird scenarios where the bride had to snag a sprinting child in mid-100 meter dash. Does the ring ever stay where it’s supposed to, or does it go flying when the boy stops to chat with his grandpa or heaves the little red pillow into the fourth row? It could be time to move on. Think about it. Societies change. Trends come and go. Would it be wrong to pre-sprinkle the rose petals? Have the bride drop her own, thus ensuring she is walking on the absolute freshest petals possible? These are just ideas. OK, they aren’t really ideas, but I’m trying. We are advancing as a people, and I’m trying to help the cause.

OK, issue No. 2 … Why can’t we throw something of substance at new couples?

There is a wedding-related urban legend that led to the demise of rice at weddings. You’ve all heard it. It states that throwing rice at newlyweds as they leave the church is irresponsible because birds eat the rice and then it expands in their stomachs and they die. The more glamorous versions say the rice-eating birds explode. And people actually believe that stuff, even though no one has ever actually seen a bird explode. Except for people who were at this game …

I’m 99 percent sure this exploding bird theory was started by the people who have to clean up after weddings. However it started, it was told and re-told and on some basic level it sort of seems to make sense, if you ignore the fact that birds feed on rice all over the world and the digestive system works a touch faster than rice soaks up water. As a kid, the rice throwing was the highlight of every wedding. After you’d sat in a hot church all afternoon with a tie on, sweating through the longest and most boring moments of your young life, rice throwing was the payoff. Someone said to you, “Grab a handful of rice and whip it at those people in fancy clothes.” I nearly threw my arm out of socket at age 12. I remember being at a wedding where the groomsmen got up on the roof and dumped a drum of rice on the new couple as they left the church. Classic. When I was a kid, I wanted to be a groomsman when I grew up.

Well then sometime in the early ’90s, rice started being phased out. Instead, people released doves or butterflies or balloons as the couple made the trek from the church to the getaway car. At some weddings, they handed out rose petals to throw. One of my friends had a wedding where everyone got a little dispenser to blow bubbles* at the couple as they went by. The point was no longer to strike fear into the newlyweds, but to make a beautiful scene for photography. As if there weren’t enough moments to capture at a wedding.

*I did, in a moment of brilliance, manage to pull the top off of the dispenser and toss a tiny amount of soapy water at the couple, and I’m told the bride got some in her eye. They are still married to this day. No need to thank me.

At my brother’s wedding, each person was given an envelope of paper hearts to throw, and I have to admit it did look kind of cool with all that red and pink flying and the couple strolling through. Not the point, though. It’s important not to get distracted by cuteness. I have written at length about my theories of American marriage and how its downfall is directly related to the wimpifying of the church-to-car-escape. For the non-religious, it would be courthouse-to-car or Vegas-chapel-to-car, or whatever. Although, if you’re already in Vegas, why would you need to get in a car?

I will save you the 5,000 word dissertation, but my half-serious theory is that if there were a bit of danger involved in the church-to-car journey, then people might not jump into marriage quite so quickly. Let’s say, just for argument’s sake, that everyone at the wedding got to throw one rock. I know, I know. It’s silly, but play along. You’d have to be IN LOVE to risk a stone to the temple. There’s potential here. Think of the places this could go. BB guns for everyone! A gauntlet, complete with gator-filled pits and booby traps and spinning swords. For the wintery weddings, how about an icy walkway?

You’d have to work as a couple to even get through it. You’d have to communicate, compromise, plan, deceive, run with a shield while screaming, all the things that make marriage great. The divorce rate is over 50 percent now. Turtle doves aren’t working. Let’s give this a shot.

This entry was posted on Monday, August 17th, 2009 at 10:09 pm and is filed under Relationships. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.