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.

*Remind me sometime to do an entire blog about my hometown dentist, an aging man who died while still practicing. My family had to switch dentists, obviously, and on the first visit, the new guy said I had 10 cavities that needed to be filled. It might have been 12. I can’t remember. It was not a fun two weeks. Point being, Willie Mays wasn’t the only one who hung on to long. It’s hard for all of us to move on from what we love and what we know.

De La Hoya’s career is an interesting one, and not just because he is a future hall of famer who had 10 world titles and was one of the most popular boxers of his era. It’s also that his greatness is so questionable, or at least questioned. It’s that you can’t talk about him without someone mentioning that boxing was weak during his era. It’s that you can’t help wondering how a Mexican-American boxer from Los Angeles could remain so unpopular and disconnected from the Mexican-American community.

There was a constant struggle in De La Hoya’s career. He just wasn’t the warrior some people wanted him to be, that so many Mexican fighters had been. It wasn’t in him. He danced. He dodged fists. He threw a punch, then moved, then threw another, then moved again. He was the ”Golden Boy.” He posed for magazine covers and milk moustache ads. He released a CD. He was mainstream. There was that famous fight in 1999 against Felix Trinidad where De La Hoya had the fight all but won, and then didn’t finish him. Not that he couldn’t finish it. He chose not to. He played prevent defense. He stopped attacking. In the final rounds, he dodged and ran and avoided and just generally stayed away from Trinidad. That’s not the way men are supposed to win fistfights. And as it turned out, he didn’t win it, and not too many people felt sorry for him.

De La Hoya was a great boxer, but ultimately bound to the image of a pretty boy. He didn’t seem to mind. Hard to blame a man for being born attractive. But you never saw him out-slug anyone. You never saw him in the 12th round, eye swollen shut, lip split open, throwing punches with nothing but guts. To some extent, you suppose a man is who a man is, and we should just be grateful to have seen such a talented boxer. But there was this unavoidable feeling that after De La Hoya won that gold medal in the Olympics and became a household name that the sport wasn’t the most important thing. It was the fame and money and business that seemed to drive De La Hoya. Maybe it always was. Maybe there’s nothing wrong with that.

At the press conference, though, it wasn’t his retirement that brought De La Hoya to tears – not that a boxing retirement is ever binding – and it wasn’t the memories of his 45 professional fights or his wins against 17 world champions or that gold medal from the 1992 Games. It was his dad.

Joel De La Hoya Sr. was a boxer. So was his father. Oscar’s brother, Joel Jr., was a boxer, too. Boxing was woven into the family tree, like old Christmas lights, but Oscar just wasn’t drawn to it at first. He played baseball and skateboarded. He never got in street fights. He hated violence. Part of the sadness at De La Hoya’s press conference had to be for his mom, a woman who wanted her son to be a champion and died all those years ago, before he won the gold medal, but I imagine a lot of it was for that relationship with his father. He must have experienced a lot of the same emotions most sons do with tough dads. There must have been times when he felt pressured. There must have been times when he felt trapped in the gym, hitting the speedbag again and again, hour after hour, when his friends were playing catch and eating ice cream.

I’m not sure when you stop wanting to please your father. Probably never. Is there any song more true than that country tune by Rodney Atkins, “Watching You?” As kids, we want to be our dads. We talk like our fathers, act like them, say the same things they say. As we get older, we are drawn to our dad’s profession. We want to take over the family business, work side by side, sweat and triumph and ache together. My dad is a farmer, and if I hadn’t accidentally found writing in my early 20s, I’m 99% sure I’d be raising corn with him in southwest Kansas. Not that he needs my help, but I picture it a lot, coming in together after a 12-hour day, covered in dust and sweat, father and son, like some sort of Ford truck commercial. There would be exchanged looks of contentment, pride. We would be working the land together, tilling the soil, growing crops, feeding families the way fathers and sons did in the ’50s. Heck, the way they did in the 1830s and the 1530s, the way they’ve done forever. OK, we’d have GPS and XM radio in our tractors, but still, there would be nobility in it.

Of course it wouldn’t really be like that. Not all the time anyway. Father-son relationships are complicated. In the beginning, there are rules and discipline and in the end there is friendship, and you spend your lives trying to make the transition. The struggle is what makes the moments, and you never forget those, the hugs and the times your dad looked at you with his eyes filled to the corners.

In boxing, there’s a pretty sharp line between the victories and defeats. No one else takes blame. It is absolute joy or crushing defeat, and you can imagine what a 36-year-old boxer and his father have been through in a long career. I’m just guessing here, but those were probably the things that went through Oscar De La Hoya’s mind when he thanked his dad. When his voice cracked. When he seemed a lot less like a celebrity, and a lot more like a common man.