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First Encounter

"Life is short," Mark said to me after he heard that I was getting married.

"Life is like a pair of shorts," I said to Mark after he married Ellen.

"What does that mean?" he asked.

"I don't know. But four years ago you told me that Life is short,' and here we are, still alive."

"Oh, I get it."

Glad he did, because I didn't.

Kelly and I were married in a beautiful church and had a lovely reception in the historic home of Thomas Jefferson's Postmaster General, Gideon Granger (1767-1822). Soon thereafter, the party shifted to a hotel1 on the sandy north shore of Canandaigua Lake, "The Chosen Place" to the Haudenosaunee, the Native American People of the Long House.

Mark and Ellen eloped.

They avoided the hassle and anxiety of planning a wedding and the expense of paying for it. They avoided the inevitable conflicts between family and future in-laws and the excitement of calling the whole thing off once or twice. They avoided writing all those "Thank You" notes for the wedding gifts.

Ah yes, wedding gifts. Come to think of it, writing "Thank You" notes would not be so bad. Mark's parents agreed to host a summer party at their cottage on Three Mile Bay near Watertown to celebrate the marriage of Mark and Ellen. I was all for going, but Kelly was not. She said that Mark was a psycho-loony-tune and wanted nothing to do with him. But Mark's brother, Terry and his wife, Debbie, pleaded with us to go. Debbie also considered Mark to be mentally unstable and had no use for Ellen, a self-professed professional photographer. Ellen shot heaps of garbage being unloaded into landfills and called it "cunningly artistic." To Debbie, an honors graduate in Art History, Ellen was a charlatan. They said that they desperately needed our company through what was certain to be a stressful and dysfunctional weekend.

So for our friends Terry and Debbie, we had to go. Kelly picked me up at work Friday afternoon, and with our 20-month-old son Lance strapped into his car seat, we drove directly to Terry and Debbie's apartment to share the long ride to Watertown. Terry and Debbie were married the year before in a beautiful church and held their reception at an historic hotel in Johnstown, New York. One of the more entertaining episodes was my stepping in to break up a nasty fight (yes, a blow was struck for feminism) between a young bridesmaid and a man a couple of years her senior. I thought I was doing quite the good deed until Terry tapped me on the shoulder and said, "Uh, Ken, they're

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