I'm back.

I wasn't going to write in here today. In fact, I was thinking about destroying this stupid thing altogether because someone that I trusted with the URL broke his promise and now I have no idea who is reading this...Who he may have given it to...Actually, for the record, if you're reading this, it's in no way the person you told, because I thought I had given the URL to that person. Really it's the breach of trust. Also the withholding. Right now I'm annoyed with this person, who claimed to be trustworthy. Anyway, I haven't decided what I'm going to do about this. I could close off the site, making it private, and keep writing. Or I could maybe transfer everything to a new URL, which would be a drag because I like the one I have. Or I could just stop writing. Haven't decided.

So, the much anticipated weekend was fantastic. My friend wanted her wedding to be at "a little out of the way place with close friends and family" and she achieved that. It was beautiful, she was beautiful and they were so in love and their families were so happy and it was so fantastic to see and hang out with people I haven't seen since college five years ago. Everyone seemed the same, and different, but BETTER different. With wives and husbands, boyfriends, and girlfriends - some from college and some new to the group - but the additions seemed to add to the group, which is weird for a group that was so tight that an outsider once dubbed us WACO. I remember a couple of years ago, right after college, thinking, I would love to go back in time and relive one week or one day from college, but it would have to be going back in time and not a present day reunion because I wanted it to be the same. Not older or as a married unit or mature or whatever, just to relive one day, any day, or week like it was. It's kinda weird, but that's what this weekend felt like. It felt like nothing had changed. Like we weren't any older and we all weren't living so far from each other nor so out of touch nor working 9 to 5 jobs where we wear suits to work and have expense accounts; not home owners or MBA students nor living in foreign countries or whatever our differences are now. For four or five days, we were the people we used to be. And we had F-U-N.

What a great idea for a wedding. To gather everyone you love on a private island and keep it low-key. Do what you want. Hang out and catch up or take off by yourself and chill out. But to bring all the people in these two peoples lives, from various areas of their lives, together and let them work it out. And that's what happened. People came from different areas of the country and even out of the country and it took everyone at least a day to get there. Only one airline flies into Hilton Head and then you must take a ferry (which runs on scheduled hours throughout the day - and if you miss it, too bad, buddy, you're shit out of luck for two hours or until the next day) for an hour trip that takes you to this island. From there, a shuttle picks you up and drives you through this lush green, almost tropic, place until you get to a clearing near the beach and you see this enormous Inn painted a mellow yellow that looks like an enormous Southern plantation. Further down from the Inn are wonderful little two and four bedroom cottages, making it resemble Nantucket - or so I'm told. You get around the island via golf cart, bike or walking and it was pretty much a free-for-all with this group. You rented a cart and left the key in - faageddaboutit. Around midnight or later someone is going to stumble upon it and "borrow" it to get home or to late-night. Same deal with the bikes (guilty as charged with that one). Just one bar on the island, with last call at 11PM, that means for this group of boozebags, that extracurricular activities were routed to the cottages for late-night.

The wedding was at sunset on Saturday and it was exquisite. Bridesmaids just wore simple Lily Pulitzer sheath dresses (madris shantung) and pink cardigans and the boys wore tan suits, pink shirts and Lily ties. All of her little cousins (maybe 8 of them) were "flower" boys and girls and they all wore matching Lily dress/pants/ties in a print different from the wedding party and they walked in first ringing china bells - isn't that a great idea?!?!

Literally, it was like a spread out of Town and Country. The tables were set up on a patio outside of the Inn and the chairs and altar were set up a few yards away on the 17th hole of the golf course, right in front of a gazebo facing the ocean. The wedding party pulled up with the bride and groom in a large covered horse and carriage - like the kind that the affluent traveled in the 1800's (not like the cheapie's you might ride in Central Park). The tables were covered in wedding quilts and the settings were beautiful. Simple - nothing ornate like 14 glasses and 24 pieces of silverware a setting. The tables were each named after a county in Ireland and you received your table name on your way through the Inn to the wedding (you walked through the tables to walk out to the green where the chairs were set up). And they served TURKEY ( what a great idea, right? Because who doesn't like turkey???) with wild rice, stuffing, veggies and cranberry sauce. No champagne, no liquor, only wine and beer and you know what - no one knew the difference. I thought that was a great idea too! Wine and beer is perfect.

Sunday came and everyone went except for me and 4 of my old girl-friends. The brides parents invited us to stay, everyone had left their cottage and they had extra bedrooms. So we did. It was a little unsettling to pass cottages where we would have seen a friend steeping into or out of an yelled something vulgar as we lazily passed, but we managed to relaxe and drove around the island searching for the little out of the way church that my friends were married in for the first part, the religious part of the ceremony. Only the immediate family was invited to that part of the ceremony because the church fit about twenty people. We drove our cart through this uncut tropic on dirt roads until it truly seemed like we were in Appalaccia (sp?). And you know what? People LIVE out there. In these tiny tin shacks with second hand furniture on their lawn, natives of this island live underneath these *greengreengreen* trees in a place you would never know how to find and you almost wonder if they walked with their building materials - maybe as far as they could go into the wilderness, until they got tired, and then they stopped and said, "okay this is good," and they built these places and settled right there.

I said to my friends, it was like stepping into the movie "The Apostle" and any minute I expected to hear Robert Duvall's voice on the radio, inviting me to come to the church picnic on Sunday and if I was "worried about gettin' there, well shucks,(he'd) drive the Lord's bus right on up and give me ride because the Looooorrrrddd is here for you to lean on and he wants to inviiiiiiiite you to his house..." And sure enough, we must have seen 2 of those decrepit buses that looked like junkers with the name, "St. John's Southern Baptist Church," painted in blue, nearly faded into a bleached out white on the side of the bus, but I could feel that those buses were started like clockwork on every Sunday and sure as pie they run all day - packed to the gills.

So we found the church, in a little clearing. The First African Baptist Church, nonetheless, and it was nothing short of perfect. I little white crooked church, built on a crooked foundation with the crooked doors hung on crooked doorjams and molding cut crooked to even out the gaps. Walking inside was surreal and you could feel the vibe of the church like a tremor, and could faintly hear the notes that were hanging in the dead air from the last service, and you just knew that those walls shook every week from the loud voices worshipping and confirming their beliefs and investing every gram of faith they had into that Lord and that church and at that moment it felt like the holiest place I had ever stepped foot in. And I looked at the clowns I was with in there and remembered our gutter mouths and our sins from the last few days, let alone years we have been flagrantly sinning together, and I though "Shit, I better get the F out of here before I taint this holy ground." People like me have no business being in places like that. We're lucky they let us in the door and we should try to get in and out unscathed and not trash up the joint. And that's what we did. And on our way out, one of my friends knocked over a pew and I think we all knew we were out of our league. And so we headed back to the resort.

So we stayed the extra day and then next morning we headed to the mainland *earlyearlyearly* to get settled. I had lunch with the girls and then headed out to the airport, with standby on my mind so I could get into work today. I got back to NYC around 11PM, my luggage showed up at my apartment around 4AM. Came into work today and I am dead tired. But I knew a lot of you were waiting for my update. And so there it is.

I am tan and rested and happy to have seen friends I haven't seen in years and to know they are still the same and that we are still friends. And then I came into work today and received an e-mail from my quiet-as-a-churchmouse-roommmate from Freshman and Sophmore years whom I have been ruthlessly accused of corrupting, and I find she's engaged and so is one of our other friends from college, and that she and her fiance may be transfered to Munich and that her brother got a Fulbright scholarship to London (Jesus Christ - that kid was in GRAMMER SCHOOL last I checked. WHAT THE...?)and she closes her e-mail with this blow to my already fragile single mentality, by asking: Should she expect to see me at the college reunion this summer? She said that she can't wait to see me and catch up!

My reply? "Congratulations, I'm so excited for you!" I'm considering having that printed on business cards so I can just hand them out. "But I'm not sure if I'll be going to the reunion seeing as I haven't changed and I have nothing new to bring to the table, so maybe I could just get back to you when I find out if I have anything to update you with that's going to make it worth your while to talk to me?"

I haven't heard back from her.

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