Santiago agrees, "the bride looked beautiful"

Santiago had a particularly good time at the wedding of my friends Anne and Dave last evening. He's generally a fairly retiring fellow, but was able to overcome his almost pathological agoraphobia to make at least brief appearances at our Table 10, in order to wolf down the mushroom soup, cucumber salad, roasted cornish hen with mushroom rice stuffing, new potatoes and baby vegetables, and a dessert which, as the Best Man observed, fell somewhere on the endlessly delicious continuum between mousse and ice cream - all this between frequent trips to calm his palpitating nerves by cowering in his Escalade in the parking lot.

"That wedding really was lovely," Santiago commented delightedly to me near the end of the night's festivities. He was lurking in a darkened corner of the Garden Room, and I had taken a break from getting jiggy to 80s medleys, Stevie Wonder and the Time Warp to keep him company. "I had a wonderful time - I just wish weddings could be done with fewer attendees."

"But Santiago, it's traditional to have mass gatherings to affirm important personal and cultural milestones in every culture. And your neuroses notwithstanding, weddings are supposed to affirm a collective responsibility for our lives. As the rabbi pointed out at the ceremony, it takes a community to support a couple - and it's not just humanistic Judaism that teaches that!"

"I admit I only saw bits of the ceremony through peaking in the chapel window," Santiago averred. "But this is certainly a big community. There are friends and relatives here from all over - a Hollywood uncle and his Hollywood wife from somewhere in California, a couple of hacienda-owning relations from Mexico, a granny from Salt Spring Island, English uncles, Welsh cousins. There are those three terrifyingly competent friends of the bride from Vancouver (one came all the way from Japan). I feel positively domestic in comparison!"

"I don't know about that, Santiago," I murmured, entranced by the hypnotic and slightly alarming gyrations of one of the bridesmaids on the dancefloor. "Your origins have always been a little uncertain. But surely you have an opinion on the question that's the 'elephant in the room' - is it a bad idea to get married when you're twenty-one?"

"Fiddlesticks," replied Santiago. "I couldn't agree more with the Best Man's stirring speech. It IS out of the ordinary for people to marry young these days, but we've never seen Anne and Dave as anything other than extraordinary."

"I think that was an exact paraphrase," I noted drily.

"Well, imitation is the sincerest form of flattery," replied Santiago, only a little defensively. "But Nick's sentiment isn't hard to back up. Even that old grump Nietzsche ruefully admitted that 'it is not a lack of love, but a lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages' - and Dave and Anne have a quality to their friendship that's exquisite precisely because it's so understated. It's like the vein of gold that runs underground and makes the hill valuable."

"Very pretty, Santiago," I agreed. "But marriage isn't just sunshine and roses. There will be tears before bedtime even in the most contented of marriages."

"The poet Ranier Maria von Rilke claimed that 'a good marriage is that in which each appoints the other guardian of his solitude,'" replied Santiago, unperturbed. "It's that ability to cultivate a silence that says a little more than words ever could that I think Anne and Dave have, and that will ultimately dry any tears."

"I think you're right, Santiago" I smiled, watching the bride and groom dance gracefully together amidst the flailing limbs of slightly inebriated groomsmen, bridesmaids, and their mothers. "And anyway, didn't Homer sum it up best when he said that 'there is nothing nobler or more admirable than when two people who see eye to eye keep house as man and wife, confounding their enemies and delighting their friends'?"

"Sometimes the old lines are the best ones," agreed Santiago. "And while I hope Anne and Dave have very few enemies, I can see that, as for friends, they'll never be in short supply." "But oh," cried Santiago suddenly, caught by the moment, "doesn't the bride look beautiful?"

I couldn't have agreed more. Congratulations, Anne and Dave.