I am getting married in a few weeks.  As a groom, there are many Big Picture things you need to do to prepare for the wedding, such as agree that the wedding location is perfect, buy a tuxedo, and feign interest in a set of plates. 

There's an old saying that says the devil is in the details. I have no idea what this means, but I think it has something to do with being old.  When you're planning for a wedding there are a million details, if you are the groom, you are responsible for three of these details, including selecting music, looking at pictures of your honeymoon destination on the internet and agreeing that your fiance has more friends than you do.

My mother, like most moms, has a policy whereby she targets a directly inverse relationship between how much something matters, and how much she lets it consumer her thoughts. For example, she has given a combined fourteen seconds of thought to her last five car purchases but has spent approximately the entire summer looking for a dress to wear to my wedding.

One other detail that has taken a considerable amount of her time was her assignment to provide my fiance with a picture from my parents' wedding.  This picture is supposed to be hung on a clothesline, or from string, or on an easel, and will join pictures of all of the previous marriages in both of our families.  It is my understanding that this exhibit will be used to prove that men used to have mustaches.

For most couples, this assignment would involve looking through the attic for their wedding album, noting how young and thin they and everyone else looks, and eventually getting mad that they let their mother talk them out of eating carrot cake.  The rub, in this case, is that my parents do not have a picture from their wedding, or at least one in which they appear together, or facing forward.  This is the case either because they did not actually have a wedding, or because they did not hire a photographer, or because it was the early 1970's, and people were building schools that had no interior walls.

The solution in this case, was to bring the pictures to a photo store, which, thanks to the Internet, had time to help her because it no longer has to develop pictures of people holding drinks in various locations.  Through the Magic of Computers, the owner was able to make a picture of my parents by combining their images from separate shots to create a single picture in which they both look young, and plausibly, together.

When my mother was visiting recently she told me she was glad to hear that we'd decided on a theme for our wedding. I was surprised by this because I was not aware that we had a theme for our wedding.  According to my mother,  the theme  is “paper bags” because “the guy who built the house where you're getting married either invented the paper bag, or made paper bags.”  I am uncertain about how this theme will play itself out, but it reminds me of my early years in theater, which could more appropriately be known as my only years in theater. 

In 6th grade my friends and I wrote a marginal story about a logger, some vehicles, and a pig, which we intended to perform as a puppet show for our parents.  This project was part of my music class, which was held in a basement room with no widows and exposed pipes that were probably made of asbestos.   The play was potentially very unfunny, but about three days before we were to open our show, we arrived in the musty room to find that our teacher, who sang only in a falsetto, had altered the play, to involve a Tasmanian Devil which everyone agreed, was the dumbest thing they had ever heard.

Since I am more mature than I was in 6th grade, I have facial hair.  Also, I will accept whatever ways this theme affects my wedding and am fully prepared to agree with my mother in law that I have in fact known about this theme all along.  So far, all I've heard is that I can expect the theme to play prominently in the gift bags we leave at the various hotels for our guests.  Gift bags are something that all weddings must have, because they are a  “nice gesture.” To properly make a gift bag, the parents of the bride purchase a bottle of water and place it into a decorated bag along with several hundred brochures of activities such as whitewater rafting and colonial museums which are located between 0 and 4 hours from the wedding site and which are eventually placed in the garbage by hotel workers.

When we were driving to our wedding location for the initial visit we passed a sign about a petrified forest or a sunken forest, or some kind of unconventional forest. If it's a petrified forest, the wood will be lighter than traditional wood and therefore, I assume, more conducive to bag making, if it's a sunken forest it'll be too wet to do anything productive and we'll just have to settle for furnishing our guests with a pamphlet about it, but since all of these things are details, I'll leave them to the people in charge.