The night before he got engaged, James told me, "I think I could handle not being married," waited a beat while I looked at him with a cocked eyebrow, and finished, " ... but I'd probably end up pretty weird." And that's part of the genius of language, the flexibility of definitions. A mutual friend of ours, James Lyons, once showed James and me a giant brass soy bean he had sculpted for his future wife and explained to us that as a person handles brass the oils and moisture from their hands will patina the metal. The trick being that everyone's touch results in a different patina depending on their diet and nutrition, body chemistry, etc and has its own unique impact on the way the brass ages and changes. I'm not sure what kind of effect dozens of powdered doughnuts and gallons of mountain dew have on a brass patina, but I do know that as [James] and Patrisha begin to share one another's joys and handle one another's challenges, that you will uniquely impact one another. In effect, you will be weird. Not the pale, long goatee wearing, wood-shaving sprinkled weird you would be left to your own devices for the next 80 years, but weird in a glorious way you never could have achieved on your own. I'm proud to have done my part in making you as weird as you are today, and pleased to have the honor of watching that processes continue to unfold between you and your wife. So here's to growing old and weird with the ones we love.
I have been very happy to be not only a part of their wedding, but a part of their lives for the past two years. I look forward to the day that they can both look back to Dec 5, 2009 and realize that from this point on they will have been married longer than it took them to find each other.
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