Everywhere I go I find a pal

Peter Weinschenk, Editor, The Record-Review

My son, Guthrie, was married to his fiance, Alyse, on Saturday at the Mosinee Brewing Company. It was a wonderful wedding that was executed flawlessly. No drama. Lots of fun, if lots of work. People showed up from Michigan, Virginia, California and even Stuttgart, Germany. The wedding attendees were very nice, very friendly. They could let loose on the dance floor. Even the many lawyers.

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The wedding ceremony was performed by a local rabbi and included a number of Jewish traditions, including use of a chuppah, a rustic, decorated wooden structure meant to resemble a bedouin’s tent.

I made the chuppah using 94-inch birch sticks harvested from the Blue Hills of Rusk County and paid for with a 30-pack of Busch Light.

The structure went together well with bolts and carpenter screws. A crew of four people, including some welcome tall people, helped in the construction. Later, the chuppah was dressed up in linens and covered tastefully with florist greens. It looked great.

My chief fear was that the structure would disassemble in an embarrassing failure. My fear was misplaced. The biggest problem, actually, was tearing the thing apart after the ceremony. The battery on my cordless drill died and so I couldn’t remove the carpenter screws. I wound up busting screws to break down the structure so I could haul it back home.

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This is not to say that there were no glitches in the wedding prep. There were and there was one I had to deal with. I had a near lawn mowing disaster.

Two days before the wedding, a newly installed belt on my lawn mower rolled and, with two thirds of my lawn cut, the mower stopped working.

I called my local service shop. “I have a lawn mower emergency,” I said.

The initial response was incredulous. “There are no lawn mower emergencies,” I was told.

“Well,” I said. “I have family coming in from across the United States tomorrow to see a lawn partially mowed that looks ridiculous.”

There was silence on the other end of the phone.

In the end, the shop performed some jiffy quick belt replacement and, with two hours before wedding guests arrived at my house, I finished mowing my lawn.

Love conquers all!

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Hopefully, everyone at the wedding can carry with them good memories and fond feelings after the event. Professional photos will rekindle precious moments for years to come.

We, at the Weinschenk household, take away even more from the ceremony. We were gifted with all of the leftover Mexican food. We have sufficient rice, beans and corn tortillas to feed Zapata’s army for a week. It’s all stored down in a spare refrigerator we have in our basement.

“If music be the food of love, play on,” wrote William Shakespeare in his play, Twelfth Night.

The Bard of Avon was surely talking about chicken fajita tacos.