This weekend, my mother and my father got married.

Not that I was a bastard (at least in a literal sense), mind you. They got divorced when I was in junior high school, married other people, got divorced from those other people, eventually patched up their differences, and married each other again.

Needless to say, it's a little surreal to be standing up at your parents' wedding. I was supposed to sing, too, but my jaw woes put the kibosh on that. My brother and I couldn't look at each other during the ceremony, otherwise we would have burst out in laughter.

Case in point: the pastor chose to read Ephesians 5:22-28 as the scriptural passage. When he boomed out, "Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands..." my brother and I, both well mindful of the fact that our mother is probably the least submissive woman on the face of the planet, looked at each other wide-eyed, and then nearly bit holes in our lips to hold in the guffaws.

Smart-aleck that I am, as the ceremony drew to a close and the pastor intoned, "What God has joined together, let no man put asunder," it was all I could do to keep from interjecting, "...again!"

When the ceremony was over, it was time for us to Socialize With The Family. Karen was apprehensive about this phase (which took up the remainder of the weekend), but I told her not to worry; my brother and his wife had their two sprogs there (a three-year-old boy and an eight-month-old girl), and they held the other adults' interest as the center of attention.

And then there was the eating. It seemed like there was an enormous meal every three hours, like clockwork; I think we ate more in two days than we normally eat in a week. Which, at least in my case, wasn't too bad; due to my inability to eat solid food for nearly two weeks, all of my pants are too big, so maybe the feeding frenzy will help in that respect.

The different branches of the family definitely have different interests. One branch is wild about NASCAR, which Karen and I find incomprehensibly foreign. I suppose it's analogous to our participation in the SCA; where we go to events, they watch races. Where we watch programs about history, they watch Jeff Gordon hawking his wares on QVC. Where we go to meetings, they watch time trials (I'm sure that our business meetings would be about as interesting to them as watching single cars do two laps on an otherwise-empty track was to us). Where we collect books and fabric, they collect little model cars and Coke bottles with NASCAR drivers depicted upon them. And I'm sure our hobby seems every bit as weird to them as theirs is to us.

But now the festivities are over, we're back home, and now it's time to wait for the next wedding or funeral in order to see the rest of the family.