One of Skylar's closest friends got married in 2020. I don't know if you remember that year, but it turned out to be a very bad time to get married if you cared at all about having people attend your wedding.
Now, I'm not going to lie to the good people of It Just Gets Stranger Dot Com and pretend, in a general way, that I was devastated when it was decided that this friend would not have wedding guests attend their tiny ceremony. This is because from Year of Our Lord Cher two thousand and fifteen to Year of Our Lord Cher two thousand and nineteen, Skylar and I attended a different wedding every 48 hours without a single break.
I am not the reason we went to so many weddings. I'm basically 100 and all of my friends got married right after they returned from World War II and most of them are dead now anyway. We haven't been invited to a wedding for one of my friends since Clay Aiken was robbed on American Idol.
But Skylar? His friends are too young to even know who Clay Aiken is. And they all started getting married in 48-hour slots starting eight years ago. And because Skylar has somehow managed to meet and become best friends with every single person in the world, he is expected to go to all of these weddings, which means I'm also expected to go to all of these weddings. If you have gotten married in the last eight years, I've definitely been to your wedding and I definitely ate more than my share and flirted with your grandpa.
Skylar was very sad that he couldn't attend this 2020 wedding, and he and his friends agreed that they'd need to figure out a time, much later, to get together to celebrate.
Weeks turned to months. Months turned to years. Like sand through the hour glass, so are the days of our lives. The next thing we knew, this now-married couple gave birth to twins. I don't know if you're familiar with twins, but basically, some people take the already impossible task of having to raise a baby and double it.
These twins turned one last week and it was decided in a meeting I was not invited to attend that Skylar's college friends who could not attend the wedding and still had not met the babies would finally descend upon Our Nation's Capital, where the family resides, and help put on a first birthday party. So that's how I ended up flying six million miles last week to go to the birthday party of two babies I'd never met.
We ended up staying with the friend's parents, who live nearby, and who insisted that we not get a hotel. The friend's parents are Iranian and apparently Skylar befriended them many years ago and even moved in with them for a while and consumed Iranian food in mass quantities on a daily basis and this is why he now loves Iranian food and seems to know so much about it. (I just learned this fact about his life last week.)
I had protested the staying with other people plan and tried to book a hotel but I was told in no uncertain terms that this wasn't an option. It was at this point that I realized I needed to reframe this trip within traditional "In-law Rules." For those unfamiliar, In-law Rules come into play when you go visit your in-laws and basically they just mean that you don't get to make any decisions for you own life. It's honestly a relief once you accept this.
Our hosts were outrageously accommodating and fun to get to know, and the twins' birthday party was better attended and organized than any birthday party I have ever had in my life.
Skylar showed up to the party early Saturday morning to help set up. When I arrived a few hours later, I found him on food duty in the kitchen and wearing this apron.
He was a star. He even succeeded in purchasing the most annoying gifts.
Yesterday morning, as we said goodbye, I watched him walk around the house, and pick up and kiss the babies like they were his own. The joy on his face was adorable and infectious.
"That party was so fun," he said to me as we left. I agreed.
Oh god. We're going to have to start going to these between the weddings now, aren't we.
~It Just Gets Stranger