Utah Wedding Epic

My recent trip out west had a vaguely Eastern flavor to it, beginning over Provo, Utah, when I noticed the members of the family across the aisle craning their necks to view the campus of BYU from the air. I placed my hands in gassho and bowed to Happy Valley in a little salute. DW thought it was mildly funny, so the gassho/bow thing was a little joke of mine the whole trip; it's not something I do regularly, as there's a certain pretentious quality about using the zen gesture of respect in public these days, and, to quote Fawlty Towers, "pretentious? moi?" Anyhow, it seemed like it might be fun to write about gentle reader Bill's wedding to his amazingly gracious K. as a travelogue in the style of Matsuo Basho's "Narrow Road to the Interior," mixing narrative and poetry. Actually, I was bored on the flight home and decided to try my hand at haiku once again--and Basho I ain't.

DW and I arrived in Utah on Thursday and had dinner with gentle reader Jeremy.

asian flavor--yum!
good conversation; nothing
more clever to say

Friday afternoon, we made our way to the reception, which was held the night before the wedding.

reversed order? just
how radical dothey get
at this country club?

Saturday afternoon saw the big event itself. DW and I made our way from the hotel to Temple Square, evidently as the ceremony was getting underway. I am thoroughly unqualified to enter the temple itself, so we missed the sealing ceremony. It was fun walking around the grounds, watching the necessarily organized chaos of Saturday weddings at the Salt Lake Temple. I also noticed, for the first time, that Temple Square has some pretty funky landscaping. Evidently, one of my MIL's distant relatives was a landscape architect there way back when, and he made a point of importing interesting plants that could thrive in Utah.

cold stone edifice
golden angel watching o'er--
playing on the grass

Everywhere we looked, there were wedding parties, having pictures taken or waiting to have pictures taken. Speaking from personal experience, I can safely say that the bride and groom have more than pictures on their minds.

soon-to-be lovers
every staircase, photographs
anticipation

DW was appalled at what she saw as lowered dress standards for Mormon weddings. There was a gal in a very off-white dress that would have been verboten back when we were wed. Hilariously, there was a group of 20-something women seated outside the Temple, ample cleavage on display. One bystander broke out laughing when I blurted out, "well, it's certainly a more liberal Mormon Church than I remember!"

different wedding
different staircase, not ours
bridesmaids showing boobs

my wife, scandalized
told me to look; no, really!
implants on parade

Alas, no photographs.

After pictures, I hauled DW and one of her sisters-in-law to WalMart to purchase the fixings for a goody basket for the happy couple. We made it back to downtown Salt Lake just in time for the wedding dinner, inside the LDS Church's Joesph Smith Memorial Building. After the dinner, we took a stroll around the Main Street Plaza, which was controversial a few years ago because of some very bad lawyering on the part of the City and the Church. The legal issue was resolved, but the controversy brought up the long-standing tension between the Church and non-Mormon interests in Utah. I posed on the edge of a fountain.

We enjoyed our trip and, again, Puddle of Nothing extends congratulations to gentle reader Bill.