Wedding Weekend -- Part Three

Saturday dawned clear and bright for us, feeling just as a June morning in Boston should. (Not so the wedding day, but that's another story.) Another redeye flight deposited my fearless 83-year-old grandmother and two uncles (my dad's brothers, one of whom had never before been to the East Coast!).

What is with my family and red-eye flights? Bunch of air warriors, to be sure. Without small children. Grandma and Uncle Dan retired to their hotel after breakfasting with us, but Uncle John, the youngest of my dad's family and absolutely the funniest, joined us for his Boston tourist fix.

Because we had organized a little outing for whosoever among the out-of-town guests wanted to attend -- i.e. a jaunt to the Public Garden in downtown Boston and a ride on the Swan Boats (ever read Make Way for Ducklings?) I have to say, the outing was fun and we met a bunch of new friends from Houston (Phoebe's people), but it never ceases to amaze me how much inertia must be overcome in order to get large groups of people, i.e. anything beyond my immediate family, to do ANYTHING. My family is infamous for taking, oh, an hour, to move from one room to the next all together. Add about ten more people to that, and what you have is, about half an hour of standing around near the ticket counter for the Swan Boats, followed by a 20 minute ride, followed by another 30-40 minutes of skulking by the ticket counter. Note to self: Next time, buy megaphone. Or just relinquish any expectations of "making stuff happen."


That evening my family hosted a barbecue at the house for all the relatives and OOT guests. I think we ended up having about 50 people, and we must have found grace in the eyes of the Lord, because the projected thunderstorms did not arrive, and thus a nervous breakdown on the part of my dear mother was averted. :-) My sisters and SIL and I were the Big Helpers, and we had food galore, balloons, garden torches, classical music filtering out the window from Tim's laptop and some rustled-up speakers (my last-minute decree: we must have music!!!), but here's our little secret: This entire party was brought to you by Costco. I kid you not, I think we bought every last morsel of food and drink there. Hurray for premade fruit salad and veggie trays! Hurray for store-bought cheesecake and Ghirardelli brownie mix! Hurray for enormous bags of potatoes for salad and Y2K quantities of pasta salad! Oh, and hurray for the fact that one can rent extra refrigerators for a weekend. :-)


After all the excitement, the only thing to do in our glazed state of exhaustion was to engage in a rowdy game of PIT with our late-straggling guests.




Then from 11 p.m. to 1 a.m., my siblings, their spice (one mouse, two mice, one spouse ...) and self topped off the night with a discussion of how to take care of our parents for next several months. Sorry, no photos.