Davin and Elyse are very nice people to have as friends. As a small example of their generosity and good cheer, I should mention that whenever we go over to Davin and Elyse's place for a party, they serve these little appetizers that come, frozen, in plastic dimple trays packed in cardboard boxes, from BJ's Wholesale Club out in Tonawanda.
The appetizers themselves are very nice, and come in three kinds.
Davin's from South Africa, and about half his family still live there I think. This was to be a major family affair, being not only a wedding but a family reunion of pretty major proportions. All the CS geeks were attending, my friend Leah was going to be there, and all in all it was going to be a party you'd never want to miss.
It did take me a while to get the reply card back. Davin said that the first of the two pieces of advice absolutely everybody had given him (everybody who'd already been subjected to marriage, that is) was that he should definitely number the reply cards, because there will always be wedding guests who forget to write their names on the card before sending it back - and then it is very hard to make up the place cards and the guest list.
(The second piece of advice Davin got from everybody is to not separate the cards from the gifts until you have written down who gave what, because the contents of the who-gave-what relation are necessary for writing the thank-you notes. It's vital to not smash that mapping.)
Every time Elyse saw me, she would pester me to return the reply card; I had gotten as far as writing my name on it and putting it in the little envelope and stamping it, but I had been hanging on to it for a week or two waiting til I passed a mailbox that would have a same-day pickup. Finally, I happened to be sitting with Davin in his office and he asked me, "Are you officially coming to the wedding?" and I said, "Yes, I'm officially attending," and he just added me to the guest-list file.
I had recently flown from Buffalo to Philadelphia, where I'd rented a car, all in order to attend my friends Lauren and Tom's wedding, and the less said about that tale of procrastination of monumental proportions, the better. I figured I'd spent enough on airline tickets and rental cars to last myself a long long time. So I decided that I would drive down for the wedding.
The start time was 8pm on Saturday, and the drive usually takes about 8 hours from Buffalo to my parents' house in Westchester. I figured if I left at 8 in the morning, I would have plenty of time to drive to my parents' house, stop and have a little rest there, and continue on downtown to Queens for the wedding.
I procrastinated about getting ready; I didn't have a nice pair of black shoes to wear to the wedding but I decided I could pretty easily pick those up on the way. I always stop in Binghamton when I'm driving home to Westchester, partly because Binghamton is about halfway between here and there, partly because I would feel weird about not stopping because I went to college there, and partly because there's a good Chinese takeout place on Vestal Parkway near campus.
So what would be more natural than stopping in a shoe store somewhere on Vestal Parkway, getting a nice pair of shoes, and being on my way?
It also helps to know that my hair was kind of shaggy-looking at this point -- a little more shaggy than one would want when attending a good friend's wedding, especially one of the scale and ambition of this one.
I got up around 9 am on Saturday, and since I wasn't feeling really awake yet it took me a while to meander downstairs and take my shower and get dressed. I figured it would make sense to carry my suit in a garment bag rather than getting it all wrinkled and sweaty driving a car for eight hours. I packed up everything else I needed, and then I had a frightening realization.
I hadn't the slightest idea where the wedding invitation was!
This realization was followed by an even more frightening realization.
Without the invitation, I hadn't the slightest idea where the wedding was!
That last is not strictly true, of course. I did know that it was in New York City somewhere, and further that it wasn't in Manhattan, Staten Island, or the Bronx.
You can probably guess that narrowing it down to "Somewhere in Queens or Brooklyn" was of little comfort to me.
I figured out pretty quickly that the invitation was probably in my satchel, which I knew was either at work or at the University, so I decided I'd just drive by both places on the way out of town and check for the bag. It wasn't that far out of my way in any case.
The bag was at work, right next to my desk where I always leave it, and the invitation was in the bag right where I remembered it was. Then I found another minor problem. This is the wedding address that was written on the invitation:
Rockwood Park Jewish CenterTrue, I now knew "It's not in Brooklyn", but Queens is still pretty big!
Queens, New York
But I figured all was not lost; I knew that if there weren't directions in the envelope then Davin would have e-mailed them to all of us, or put them on his Web page or something. So I figured I'd still stop by the University on the way out of town, and check my saved e-mail for a directions posting.
I didn't find one.
I did, however, find the temporary-farewell mail message that Elyse and Davin had sent out when they left Buffalo the previous week; it had the phone numbers of their parents' houses in Queens and Great Neck, respectively. So I took that information down, figuring I could call for directions, and looked at the clock.
It was 11 am, and I hadn't even left Buffalo. Now I knew I was cutting it way too close. Even if I left right away I knew I would arrive tired, shaggy-headed, and sneaker-shod, and I couldn't even leave that soon because you can't make long-distance phone calls from the phone in the University office trailer, so I would probably have to rush back home to call!
You can, however, make local calls, such as those to the USAir ticket office. I said to myself, "Well, I'll just call and see how much it is, as long as I'm at a phone here, though I am still, of course, going to drive there."
I found out that the tickets were $82 each way, and that was easily affordable. So I yielded to common sense, and booked a ticket for the most convenient flight, which left Buffalo at 4:30 and arrived at La Guardia at 6:05; perfect timing! I carefully wrote the flight numbers and confirmation number on a piece of paper and made sure to put that in my satchel.
With the extra hours that had been opened up by my decision to fly, I had ample time to do all of the following (and this is the order I did them in):
I carefully wrote this on a piece of paper also, and did my final packing check. I made sure I had my complete suit and tie and dark socks in the garment bag. I made sure I had my new shoes in my satchel. I even put a change of clothes in the satchel too, for tomorrow.
The trip out to the airport and onto the plane was uneventful; no big hurry, the weather was windy but sunny and not snowing, no car troubles, plenty of gas, no traffic.
It wasn't til the plane reached cruising altitude that I discovered the sheet with the directions wasn't in the satchel. (In fact, I was later to discover that it was sitting atop my computer monitor where I'd put it so it wouldn't get lost while I was packing!)
Now I was in a real pickle, because I had pretty much used up my stock of goodwill. I felt that it would be a grave sin to call Davin again for directions. While I could still call Elyse's house, I knew that would be a very bad plan because Elyse and Davin would certainly compare notes and discover I had been double-dipping.
At La Guardia, I took the Hertz shuttle out to the rental lot, and asked for the smallest, plainest car they had. I just wanted whatever was the cheapest, of course, though I thought it would be tacky to say so directly. That was a Chevrolet Sprint, which is such a roller-skate of an automobile that it only has three cylinders and I believe it may even have a two-stroke engine, like a lawnmower.
The clerk offered to upgrade it to a Toyota Corolla for another $20 and I said no! After all, I was driving all alone and I was only going across town and up to Westchester. I really wasn't going to spend extra money for a bigger car, though the rental people seemed to have a way of making you feel like a real skinflint when you get anything less than a Cadillac.
This, too, is probably the real reason for Priority Gold and the Green Club and the Preferred-Customer Captain Midnight Decoder Ring or whatever. Really, it's no big deal to get out of the shuttle, go into the office, and make chit-chat with the clerk while they make out the rental papers. But you still feel like it's a big inconvenience compared to the incredible service you see the business travellers getting. At Hertz they get to just swipe their Official Priority Gold You're-A-Real-Cool-Guy Card through the driver's little hand-held computer, and then when they get to the lot their name is on a digital scoreboard in front of the parking space where their car is.
What is the point of the rental company setting up such a silly service? Do you think anyone will pay a real premium just to see their name on a digital scoreboard?
No!
But it makes everybody else on the shuttle bus feel like losers for renting a cheap little compact car! Then some of them will upgrade to a Cadillac. The most galling luxury is the one the other guy has that you don't.
Anyway, they didn't have any Chevrolet Sprints on the lot (and I bet they probably rarely ever do, since few people are as cheap as I am), so they had to give me a Corolla at the same price. This was good, because my own car is a Toyota too. This way, all the controls like lights, wipers, etc. would all be in the same place I was used to. That's nice to have when you're driving around an unfamiliar place in heavy traffic.
I still didn't know where the wedding place was, but some very clever people saved my butt on that one. I looked up the Rockwood Park Jewish Center in the NYNEX Yellow Pages, and got the following listing:
Rockwood Pk Jewish CntrI found Howard Beach on my map by looking near Kennedy Airport. There was an exit from the Belt Parkway which had a number that seemed familiar from my memory of the lost directions. Then I noticed that there was an 84th Avenue, and then I was very pleasantly surprised to see that it intersected with a 156th Street nearby.
156-45 84 Hwd Bch................541-5822
I didn't know this at the time, but house numbers in Queens are broken into two parts, separated by a dash. The part before the dash is the cross street, and the part after is the position within the block. This was done for the convenience of the emergency services people. The stunningly cool thing about it is that I was able to reverse-engineer the system without even knowing that it existed, or anything at all about how it works! Up til this time, Queens had been akin to a trackless wilderness to me, and here I was finding out how to get around and I had never ever been there before!
Extremely pleased with myself, I headed off into the night.
My heady feeling of navigational prowess evaporated kind of quickly, however, when I got lost one block from La Guardia airport, and had to drive around the same triangular block three times in befuddled confusion before finding the correct entrance to the parkway.
But, once I made it onto the parkway, I found the wedding place without too much trouble. I didn't know it then, but I actually drove through what were later to become familiar stamping grounds of mine when I later moved to Queens.
I drove by the Jewish Center and noted a parking place, and found a convenient cash machine around the corner from which to obtain the wedding gift.
You will note again my excellent planning and preparation. Luckily for me I had been told that the tradition at Jewish weddings is to give cash, so I was on firm ground here, and anyway they'd already been living together for a while so they already had as many dishes and useful kitchen appliances and miscellaneous random candy-bowls and vases as one couple could ever need, so the usual wedding-gift assortment wasn't very useful anyway.
I should also note at this point that when I moved into the one apartment of my own that I briefly had in Buffalo, they (and Matt) promptly showered me with all sorts of dishes and useless kitchen appliances and miscellaneous random candy-bowls and vases, as well as a small decrepit hexagonal table/cabinet which they suggested I use as a TV table. You see, in the hacker pack-rat mentality which we're all subject to, when you have old stuff, to which you are emotionally attached, like that you don't want to just throw it away because it might be useful eventually. So instead you give it to a friend when he moves into a new apartment, and then he can throw it away guilt-free because he can recognize it for the near-garbage that it is.
So, having obtained the wedding gift, I began to notice that I was a little hungry. After all, I had not eaten all day, and had traveled a long long way. I didn't know if there would be refreshments beforehand, and I didn't know how long the wedding would go on. Having heard scary stories of long weddings, I was worried I'd have to go a long time without eating. My friend Tom had been involved in the bridal party for a Russian Orthodox wedding, and had therefore been standing for about an hour, holding a crown over the groom's head. It was 45 minutes before the priest, seeing Tom's face contorted in pain and noticing his hand shaking, took pity on him and mentioned to him that it was O.K. to change hands once in a while!
So I was a little afraid I wasn't going to eat for a long time. But not to fear, for I was in Queens -- I walked out of the bank, turned right, and before I had walked ten paces I had found a pizzeria.
One slice and a small soda later, it was time to head out to the wedding place for real.
I was still a little apprehensive about whether or not I was in the right place, because I hadn't actually seen any 100% guaranteed proof that it was the right place. I knew I was at the right cross street on the right avenue, and the building did have a Magen David on it, but I had not seen anything that was conclusive, such as a sign saying "Rockwood Park Jewish Center".
I swung by the place and pulled into a parking place down the street, where I changed out of my sneakers into my good dress shoes. Have you ever tried to change your shoes behind the wheel of a Toyota Corolla? It's not a simple task. They are great cars and all, but I have to say that I doubt even such an expert shoe-changer as Mr. Rogers would be able to pull it off (much less put it back on and tie it) without bonking his head on the steering wheel and getting poked in the eye with the thing that controls the wipers.
I also turned the radio on with my head.
Returning to the spot, I put the rented car in the able hands of the rented valets in their rented tuxedos, and went inside. I was still feeling just a little unsure of my location. But I was soon provided with convincing proof that I was at Davin and Elyse's wedding.
A waiter came by, with a tray of hors d'oeuvres.
They consisted of:
It turns out that Jewish weddings aren't very drawn out. Unlike other weddings I've been to, where [a Catholic wedding I went to in Ithaca] they sing several hymns and have a sermon, or [an Episcopalian one in Binghamton] the bride and groom take communion together, a Jewish wedding is short, sweet, and to the point. They get under the canopy, the rabbi gives a short speech, they exchange vows, and Davin stamps on something which was supposed to be a wineglass but was actually a GE SoftWhite 100 Watt, and back you go for dinner.
The dancing is the part that goes on for a very long joyous time.