I am engaged to be married to a woman I love very much, yet lately I have been having second thoughts. My problem began when I started watching funny home video shows where all kinds of horrible accidents are shown happening to people at weddings. Should I really be concerned?
Anxious in Oregon
It is one of the greatest pleasures afforded a respected dispenser of advice to be able to allay some young person's fears with a gentle word of assurance, to raise the curtain of misunderstanding, and chase away the shadows of false fear. But, unfortunately, in this case, such a pleasure is denied me. Yes, you should absolutely be concerned. For I have extensive experience in this field, and I can say with complete confidence that, if anything, our humorous home video programs drastically underreport the frequency with which weddings are marred by these low comic accidents. Young man, (I believe you are young) let me tell you: Of the dozens of weddings I have seen, there is hardly one I can recall wherein a groom did not faint or an old maid break her leg diving for the bouquet or bridesmaid set her hair on fire or older guest slip and fall on the dance floor or people, who had climbed onto the tables and chairs for some reason or other, do themselves various injuries when the furniture gave way. In fact, a good handful of these accidents and similar catastrophes in some combination can be sure to happen at any wedding.
When contemplating marriage, it will be good to recall the learned Bevoriskius's warning to the youth of his day: Marrigium non inarmori inegressari sit (meaning "Marriage ought not be entered into lightly.") Note, however, that for "lightly" he uses "inarmori" which is derived from the military term and translates closer to "unarmored." For truly these accidents plagued the weddings of ancient times no less than they do ours.
Speaking of Bevoriskius has put me in mind an anecdote from his Journals that preceded and inspired his maxim. So, in answer to your question, Anxious, and for the benefit of the young everywhere, I have provided a translation below. My young readers, if your heart is not hardened to advice, if you are still capable of being moved by example and reason, hearken carefully to the story that is to follow.
From The Journals of Bevoriskius
In the year of our Lord 836, I was traveling on horseback on my way through the village of L____, when I chanced to meet two riders coming towards me riding at a furious pace. They pulled up when they saw me, and I, having greeted them in friendly terms, expressed my curiosity to know what they were about. The one, whom I noted to be the taller and handsomer of the two, bowing and addressing me, said he was Juan Dietro San Lupe; and this afternoon his brother, indicating the other rider, was to be married to Lucia Maria Espinoza, the fairest virgin in all the land. At the mention of this name, the young man paused to bow his head reverently, then continued: They had decided, so as to be out of the way of the preparations and to let the time before the ceremony pass more quickly, to give themselves the pleasure of some exercise on horseback.
The young man, seeing that his brother had not overheard, confided in me, with a glee that startled me, that he had noticed it too and, he admitted, with great satisfaction. For it was he, he swore, suddenly becoming greatly animated, who loved Lucia Maria Espinoza, not his brother; and he flattered himself to believe that his affections were returned. However, with his brother being the eldest and in line to inherit the family's estate, it was to him that her hand was promised.
This disappointment, the young man related to me, had torn at his heart for months, during which, he swore, he barely ate or slept. Then he struck on a idea. Knowing that his brother was corpulent, with a sluggish constitution, of a sedentary nature, and also by nature given to fainting, he conceived the plan, which he had that morning set in motion, of proposing strenuous horseback exercise to wear down his brother's defenses, eroding the fragile grip he had on his own health. He then would lead him to the church, with the blood racing in his veins and his powers of consciousness taxed to the limit, and hope the excitement and anxiety of the occasion would prove adequate to sever his bond with consciousness and send him into one of his fainting spells which, he hoped, might combine acute embarrassment with serious injury.
I told the young man I was always happy to meet young people who had the resolve to form definite plans for themselves. I also added that I thought his plan had every chance of succeeding, which seemed to please him very much. So we parted on friendly terms, and I continued on my way.
Not long afterwards I met a young maiden walking with flowers in her hand. I asked her what she was about. She hesitated a moment, but then said that, since she believed I had an honest face, she would tell me, although she feared I might detect a note of malice in her design. She began a long story, detailing the cruelties she had suffered and the many horrible indignities done to her by her maiden aunts. The details escape me now, as I try to recall, although I remember many times having to offer the maiden my handkerchief, so copiously did the tears flow as she recounted her ill fortune.
Finally, when she was done, she held up the flowers and said, this is the bouquet for Lucia Maria Espinoza's wedding. They, she said, meaning her cruel aunts, will be sure to scramble for it like rats when it is thrown. She was going to affix rocks to it, she said, to increase its weight a hundred times and make it a hundred times more unwieldy, so that whichever aunt caught it would be hard pressed to keep her balance and would more than likely drop to the ground like a stone, taking, if it pleased God, not a few of her sisters with her. This comic accident, she hoped, might help divert her from her suffering. I told her I hoped the Lord favored her design and traveled on.
In no time, I met three young men also heading toward the church and pushing a barrel down the path. When I had asked them to lift the veil of mystery from their design, the eldest of them stepped forward and said, this is a barrel of wax. There is a wedding today for Lucia Maria Espinoza, and her father owes my father over three hundred florins which he has refused to pay. We are going to wax the floor of the wedding hall, he said, for, as everyone knows, Don Espinoza is very fond of dancing, especially when wine is in him, which, anyone would have observed, has the effect of increasing his love for the dance as it also decreases the sureness of his feet. A broken tailbone or a fractured skull would be just what the old man deserved, he said, and, as he and his people were not content to trust to chance for this occurrence, they had decided a layer of fresh wax would move its probability into the realm of near certainty. I blessed them, and continued.
I had the road to myself for only a matter of minutes before I met a young maid with a bowl in her hand. On my stopping to ask her to explain her business, she let loose with an astounding feat of loquaciousness, the gist of which I will summarize for the reader thus: She had suffered wickedly at the hands of her cruel mistress, who was this day to act as bridesmaid for Lucia Maria Espinoza. The maid, having a great desire to revenge her wrongs, had decided, when she was called on to do her mistress's hair in preparation for the wedding, to comb it through and thoroughly saturate it with whale oil, which she had just procured that morning. Then, knowing that there would be a great number of candles alight in the wedding hall, and trusting that her mistress was by nature a vain person, often given to tossing her hair around this way and that in a way that she thought augmented her beauty, the young maid knew the odds would favor a happy collision between the hair soaked with whale oil and one of the lighted instruments. Then she expressed the joy she would feel at seeing her mistress's once beautiful coif, the source of her vanity, replaced by a blazing inferno. I thought this rather cruel but did not withhold giving her my blessing and continued.
The peace of the trail lasted but an instant before it was broken by a gaggle of carpenters heading toward town. When I had hailed them and acquainted them with my curiosity to know their business, all seemed to speak at once, detailing some grievance they had with some person or other in the town. I do not wish to burden my readers with their too numerous details. Only these wrong doers, whom the carpenters spoke out against, all had in common that they would be at the wedding of Lucia Maria Espinoza.
When the carpenters had finished their complaints, a man, whom they seemed to take as their leader, stepped forward. He did not speak at once, but rather sat down as the carpenters grew silent, looked contemplatively at the earth for a moment, and then delivered the following speech:
Tables and chairs, he said, being fairly innocuous things generally, when they are used properly, which they are by the vast majority of the populace for all other occasions, become deathly dangerous objects at weddings. A man may live in the company of a table all his life and never once have to fight the temptation to suddenly start climbing and dancing on top of it, tumbling, cavorting or attempting the most perilous stunts and jumps off of it. Yet at a wedding the urge to do so is almost irresistible. Or take the chair, he said, again after another contemplative pause. From the moment it is put together, a chair's four legs are placed on the floor, and there they remain till it rots. But what happens at weddings? Well, as soon as a man sits at a chair, a group of his closest friends and relations come by to pick him up and punch a hole in the ceiling with his head. Now this occurrence, notwithstanding the fact that it happens at nine out of ten weddings, is greeted as an accident by its perpetrators, but only from the point of view of the collision between head and ceiling. What tempted the chair's four legs, which obviously serve no purpose if not braced solidly against the earth, to be removed from the ground in the first place is really the soul of the inquiry, yet it is an element of the situation which is never looked into.
His manner of speech was impressive, and I could see he made a deep impression on his companions who stood silently in reverent attention as he spoke. It seemed from their attitude that, if none deemed themselves capable of unraveling the mystery of this wedding behavior, they all were determined to show it proper respect. Finally he broke out of his reverie by waving his hand and saying: We cannot know what makes these things happen. Only, he said, as you see, we bear a grudge against many of those who are to be at the wedding. He proposed, therefore, that the destruction the furniture had in mind for the attendees should not be allayed by its being too sturdy, well fashioned and well made. So, they intended to use their saws, axes, files, planes, scrapers, chisels, hammers, and hatchets to reduce the structural integrity of the furniture to something along the level of your sturdier dry leaves. They left with my heartfelt best wishes, and I traveled on.
Only upon my parting from the carpenters was I left to travel in peace for a good stretch. Remembering the events of the day, I was just about to thank my stars that I was putting the village of L____ behind me, when it pleased Providence that my horse should stumble over a rock and toss me into a ditch, where I fell into a coma that lasted three weeks.
On gaining possession of my faculties, I found myself in bed; and, upon being informed of my situation, the duration of my unconsciousness, and the nearness of my escape from death, by a doctor, who was at that moment relieving my veins of a quantity of blood, I thanked him, as warmly as I could, for seeing me through my illness. He, however, said he could not accept credit for my recovery for, although he had been aware of my accident for some time, he had been unable to see me till this moment because his efforts had been completely given to treating a veritable epidemic of broken bones, fractured skulls, severed limbs, disfigurements, cuts, scrapes, and burns, all suffered by the attendees of the wedding of Lucia Maria Espinoza.
That name jarred my senses and recalled to me the strange meetings related above. I told the doctor I believed I could give a good account of the source of all these injuries. I then spoke of my meetings along the road on that day of the wedding, recalling as many details as I could. He listened intently, sometimes interrupting me with a pertinent question, but otherwise letting me exercise my memory back to health.
My story having concluded, the doctor seemed to consider the details a moment, and then shook his head. No, this was not the source of the injuries, he said. The events I had recalled, could only account for a small fraction of the devastation he had seen. No, although the deeds I had heard contemplated had indeed been carried out, the misery occasioned by them was only a drop in the bucket of calamity that this wedding had wrought. For it was the wedding itself, he concluded, which was the main source of devastation.
He apparently had devoted much time to this subject. He intimated he had a solid theory, backed by many examples, which he would be more than happy to relate to me when I was more up to it. In the days that followed, I looked forward very much to hearing his thoughts, but a long succession of relapses, bad reactions, and turns for the worse amongst his wedding patients kept him away. Finally, with my health now fully recovered, I decided I could no longer stay, so I left the town of L____.
