Conversation with My Wife (154)
“Thank you for coming to our event where, oh by the way, people also got married.”
DEB: Oh honey, I had such a good time!
We were waiting between planes at Dulles airport, and my wife just felt the need to share with me. Who would have predicted that someone would enjoy themselves at a weekend wedding event hosted by her husband’s ex-wife and the ex’s new spouse?
Well, anybody who knows Linda, my ex. She has a joie de vivre that is highly contagious. And she’s a bit crazy, but mostly in a good way, mostly.
The wedding venue was a place called “The Great Escape Lakeside” which was… unusual. The entire house (which can be booked to sleep you and 43 of your closest friends) was themed on games. Video games, board games, casino games¹, giant games, tiny games, puzzle games… All of this out in a location best described as, “We’ll have someone pick you up, GPS has a hard time with this place.”
So Deb and I arrived in the middle of nowhere-in-particular at about 2AM, flying out of Pennsylvania after Deb got off work.² Linda greets us, bless her hostess heart, along with her sister and brother, who have stayed up just to see us after corresponding for years on social media.³ They give us hugs like we were long-lost cousins, not 30-years-past in-laws. Apparently my ex-wife says nice things about me.
DEB: I can’t believe how wonderful Nancy and Bud were! And everybody, really. Because having the ex-husband and his wife to a wedding has to be a little strange.
ME: Well, Linda and I were always a little strange, so there’s that. But yes, Carol just swept us in like long-lost family.
And they liked the toast I’d prepared but never actually gave.
I suspect it went over much better on a screen than if I had delivered it in person. I also posted a link on Facebook, to which Linda posted a comment.
So the above was written in early March, soon after the wedding. I wanted Linda & Carol’s blessing before posting, only Linda got back from their honeymoon just in time for the fecal matter, urine, vomit, and who-knows-what-else to hit every available fan at work (she’s VP of Student Services at a college in Jacksonville) and she didn’t have spare time to sort through old emails until mid-May.
We agreed we all got really, really lucky in timing…
And we’re going to try to get together sooner than every couple decades!
¹Which was the theme for our bedroom, with slots, cards, and a roulette table. Fortunately, there were convenient switches to turn off the large electric slot machines on either side of the round bed, or else the swirling lights and sound effects would have made it hard to sleep for even our tired bodies.
²Yes, we’re retired, but… I’m retired-retired, Deb was just-30-hours-per-week-retired at a local tax company that ramps up for tax season and just needed her through the end of April⁴. We were able to run to the airport at a reasonable hour on Friday, whereas with her old job we’d have been lucky to leave work about the time our plane was scheduled to depart.
³I’d last seen Nancy in 1990, when Linda and I were still married. I’d last seen Bud in 1987, before Linda married me.
⁴Or, as it turned out, the middle of March, thanks to the Trump Pandemic. 🙄
Copyright ©2020 by Jack Herlocker. All rights reserved, and trust me, you do NOT want to piss off my ex-wife.
