Notes from a Wedding
I attended a very lovely and very pink wedding in northern Indiana this weekend. (The pink, I should note, was very tastefully done, and I didn’t feel like puking once!) The wedding boasted a beautiful church (an unexpected gem in the middle of a dead industrial section of Elkhart), lots of young, blonde friends of the couple, some of the best wedding food I’ve tasted, an amazing frozen cocktail called a sgroppino, and a gorgeous, happy, and in-love couple. The groom probably described his bride best: she looked “like ice cream.” In all the best ways.
The wedding guests all stayed in Das Essenhaus Inn, a Dutch compound in Middlebury, Indiana. It was one-stop Amish shopping: a restaurant, bakery, hotel, shops, and miniature golf. But that Amish hospitality you’ve heard about? Not on Sundays. The promise of bacon and fried chicken (for the meat eaters) and corn mush (!?) for me? Not on Sundays! The coupon for the free round of miniature golf? NOT ON SUNDAYS! My dear friend jaq managed to build such an impressive grudge that the rest of us were more or less able to let go of our disappointment, and just live through jaq’s. Oh, and Amish people? She’ll be harboring that grudge. I hear she’ll even be extending it to the Mennonites. Just saying.
We made amends by eating enough food for 14 people (there were only three of us, I’m afraid) at a South Bend restaurant called Honker’s. (South Bend was the closest town one could find an open restaurant on Sunday.) Between us, we put away a salad, a very meaty sort of sandwich with horseradish, seasoned fries, a Belgian waffle drenched in butter and maple syrup, three coffees, one orange juice, fried corn mush, biscuits and gravy, fried eggs, thick-sliced bacon, a three-egg spinach omelet, and a double order of hash browns. This was all served to us by the delightful Dennis, who was probably the only waiter there who could have handled us, and whose white-blonde, crudely-chopped bowl cut earned his place as the fifth Beatle. Oh, and he scampered throughout the restaurant. Delightful Dennis got a delightful tip indeed!
And while drinking machine-mixed orange juice from a styrofoam cup at Das Essenhaus, I commented to Josh (jaq’s boyfriend) that I had turned into the worst kind of snob.
Josh: How’s that?
me: I’ve been squeezing my own orange juice in the morning.
Josh, wincing: Oh. Yeah, that’ll ruin your life.
* * *
current book: about 2/3 through The Elementary Particles by Michel Houellebecq.
current music: so I spent entirely too much time on YouTube last night, listening to old country favorites that I might decide to use for the country mix CD I’m working on. I started watching some Garth Brooks clips from his DVD This is Garth Brooks, and it seemed unusually familiar. And then I realized that the footage had been filmed at Texas Stadium in October of 1992, and I had been there. Both nights.
current socks: It rained. I wore flip-flops. I guess wet bare feet are better than wet socked feet?
Posted 28 August 2006
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I loved this book. I can’t pronounce the man’s name so I avoid the front cover whenever possible to avoid frustrations, but his writing makes up for it. It must be nice to have a memorable name, but a pity for him that no one can easily recommend him without pen in hand. It’s the sort of thing that makes you wish he were a woman so that he could (choose to) marry into a better surname. Of course, he’s foreign so maybe he doesn’t care about my ignorant woes.
Also — I went to a Pentecostal wedding at the U of C on Saturday. I wished they were Amish so we could dance.
Nevermind having a pen in hand; I have to have the cover in front of me to make sure I’ve got all the vowels in the right places. And I keep trying to figure out why the writing is so good. It’s so biographical in style, and so distant, even in the pornographic descriptions. And yet it’s riveting.
The Amish dance?
sqeezing your own OJ is nothing. this morning I made apple & plum juice from the trees in my garden. I slightly over did it though and the juicer vibrated itself of the counter.
ho hum.
i don’t want to get a bad reputation
as a grudge harboror (harborer? – my spell check won’t commit!),
but MAN!
those amish nearly ruined my weekend
if it hadn’t been for dennis…
& now that i’m reading this post?
i shore wish we’d taken his picture…
p.s. tim is fancy,
even with the vibration issues
corn mush is the midwestern name for polenta.
my dad never heard of polenta, but he loved mush.