…Reunions…

I have carried precious cargo, but rarely the father of a bride in a rented car, and I didn’t break him nor try to, though I did stall the car a few times which he thought very funny, and asked if I knew what I was doing and offered to help. We needed a guide to get us to the city of Ptuj (pi-too-ey, yes, just like that) and John was born in a town just over those mountains over there, and perhaps we could also go there today he probed several times (but we didn’t, something about a wedding rehearsal at 5pm or whatever). He proved to be as much a tourist as the rest of us. So, I spent my first Slovenian day after my first Slovenian night (song cue) rummaging around a surprisingly perusable castle once the home of monks, then Romans, and finally an absurdly dressed line of German princes sent to look over their territory and collect cold cash from the poor, and to this I say PTUJ!

But by word of mouth all our party from the night before came to the same castle at different times, and soon the whole place was crawling with English-speaking people taking pictures, some of which were where one person will take a digital photo and then five other people will want the same photo taken on their own cameras, meaning five-times everything from the first photo. I understand why, but really, we all should get used to scheduling those photo-sharing parties for after the event.

That evening was the wedding rehearsal at the church 300 meters away from our hotel, with its magic aged tower endlessly peaking over a small chapel that can barely hold its artifacts and treasures let alone a wedding audience. All was normal until a few people quietly walked in on the rehearsal. It seems a well-known relic painting rests above the chapel altar, just behind the bride and groom now, and this painting attracts pilgrims in long caravans and large buses, part of a Relic Review if I may be so not-clever. The work is placed just perfectly so that, when the crowd of about 50 people finished trickling into the oh-so-very-small chapel, they seemed to turn to the bride and groom, gaze upon them with smiles, and sing lovely four-part harmony to them. They were far enough away, you couldn’t really see that their gaze and thier voices were focused just a millimeter above the heads of the priest and Margaret and Tim, and on the painting behind. So I stood at the door, checked for any stragglers, closed the church door again and quietly assumed that these were the all of Margaret’s Slovenian family members who couldn’t come to the wedding the next day, and just popped in to sing to them, and all of this made me and many of us smile. Tradition? Close family? No, after the song they all just left.

Back at our hotel, there was a very large room with a very small bar and several long tables. Stairs led to the level above it, a balcony ringing the lower room and sharing the tall wooden-beamed ceiling, the balcony running by the huge kitchen and ending at the entrance to a large hall that was already being decorated with flowers in white and soft green for the wedding reception the following day. Directly below this room, back on the first floor and opposite the tables and bar, lay a sunken room with brick ceilings resembling a wine cellar, except it was filled with solid old wood tables set upon old upright barrels or notched into booths lined with equally old wood. Along the walls were shelves, and on the shelves were various implements of farming that were as old as the land. Throughout our time in Slovenia we would be told the uses of every one of the tools or devices, which resembled tools of torture more than of the land, especially highlighted along the walls of this cold brick cave. But this night, our widening wedding party once again slowly gathered to fill the room and all the tables, with the last of the new arrivals dropping their bags and grabbing a seat, the bartenders busily shuttling into the cavern, the kitchen working late. Plates of pizza with a sunnyside egg on top, steaming buckwheat porridge in a heated crock, hearty brown goulash with mystery meat, wild boar with polenta, mushroom soup, long phallic sausages, and so much more came out and went down, to make room for more and more wine (again, from the hill across the patio) provided to us by the bride’s mom and dad, whose generosity to her daughter’s guests deserves more than just a mention in a blog. They flat-out took great care of us, thanked us way too much for making the long trip to Slovenia, and smiled at our satisfaction with everything in and around us. Tim’s mom, she was always smiling and stayed up way past her bedtime smiling every night to keep us “young people” company and out of trouble.

As the night continued, we realized that this was the first time so many of us had been in the same room in over a year, marked by an increase in the fluttering flashes of digital cameras, some with the ability to take movies, and all with red-eye reduction turned ON. The movies have been rated T, for teachers only. And with all the next morning to awake, eat breakfast, shower, shave (women too), lounge, drink whiskey, and try to relax the groom, with the wedding only a short walk down and up the vine-lined road, we all meandered to our various receptacles of sleep. Except for those few who had to call a taxi 20km away into our pitch-black heaven to drive them to the other two hotels just a few kilometers away. For those of us walking to our rooms, it was oddly OK to pass the taxi driver at the bar waiting patiently for his passengers, drinking his second beer.