Get Me to the Church on Time

Today I bring you two stories, each of someone attempting to get to the church on time.  After you read both stories, I hope you will realize that no matter how crazy my life is, and no matter how many ridiculous situations I find myself in, I will never top my mother in the chaos department, and her stories will always be more disastrous than mine.  I hope you will also realize that everything I am, I come by honestly and cannot be blamed for.

STORY ONE: TENOR DAD
I started my drive back home from Florida on Wednesday, making good time, and arriving in DC that night about 16 hours after I left Florida.  I spent Thursday in the district, eating at Asian Chipotle, but mostly hanging around because one of my good college friends happened to be coming into town the same day I was going to be there, and apparently he had gathered a small crowd of other college friends for dinner, so I decided to stick around.  I had the time, as my next commitment was my cousin’s wedding rehearsal on Friday at 6 pm.

The wedding rehearsal was outside of Boston, and Google told me it would be 8.5 hours with traffic to drive there.  Karen, my GPS, told me that it would take 7.  I figured that I didn’t want to take any chances, even though I had plenty of time, so I walked out of the door at 9:10 Friday morning, expecting to arrive quite early.  4:15 according to Karen.

I was feeling good time-wise, so I stopped off in Arundel Mills to renew my Costco membership and get gas.  Things were going quite well until around Delaware.  That was when I started to realize that I was going to have a problem.  Somehow it had not occurred to me that I was driving north on 95 on the Friday of Columbus Day weekend.  I had figured I might hit some traffic, but traffic does not begin to describe it.

By the time I got over the George Washington Bridge, heading for Connecticut, my new ETA, according to Karen, was 6:10.  No problem, I thought to myself.  I’ve gotten through New York.  I can make up some time and still get there by 6, or even if I am a few minutes late I will still have to time to rehearse my song and get to the dinner.  Ah, how young and innocent I was then.

I arrived at the dinner at around 9 pm, frazzled and exhausted, having missed the entire rehearsal, and most of the dinner.  I did not get to run my song, or check out the church.  I lost 5 hours in traffic, which believe me, does things to a person.  At least I was there, having passed accident after accident, construction zone after construction zone, and for the love of Pete, who closes 95 down to one lane for construction on a holiday weekend!?  But I digress.

STORY TWO: TENOR GRAMMY
As I had been coming from Florida, the plan was to have my mother pick up my wife in Vermont on her way through, and for them all to arrive at the hotel around 2pm.  The wedding was at 5, so this would give them time to shower, change, and do whatever else girls like to do before a wedding.  Also in the van coming down were my mother’s husband, my sister and her husband, my mother’s newly adopted 4-year-old son, and my sister’s oldest daughter who was coming down to visit her father.  With my wife in tow, this brought the number of van passengers to seven.  My initial hopes were high when my wife told me that my mother was actually early for once in her life, and they had gotten on the road ahead of schedule.

The first hint of a problem was the phone call from my wife, informing me that the van was making “death rattles” and was apparently about to die.  “But isn’t this the new van that they just bought a couple of weeks ago?” I asked.  Of course it was.  I learned the hard way many years ago, never test out a new-to-you used vehicle on a long road trip.

We were told that the van was never going to make it, and could someone start driving towards them so that when the van did die, they could be picked up?  Of course they would need more than one person to head out, as there were 7 of them, so unless the person was also driving a van, they would not all fit in one car.  Naturally we were all trying to get ready for the wedding, we being me, my aunts, uncles, cousins, friends, and pretty much every other person we knew, so nobody was willing to make the 3-4 hour round trip 4 hours before the wedding.

It was just before 1pm when I received this text from my wife: “FML.  And the car died.”  That was followed shortly by a text reading “Your mom just flagged down an ambulance,” which was followed 15 minutes later with a picture of a police car and the caption “The police car your mom is riding in.”

I tried to call my wife, but there was no answer, so I tried to call my sister.  Also no answer.  I finally decided to just call my mother, who did pick up, despite being in the back of the police cruiser.  I believe the conversation started something like this: “Mom, #$*^%$@#*%&#%*!!!!!”

Apparently my mother flagged the ambulance down as a joke, or rather, she just saw the ambulance driving by, so she decided to wave to it to be friendly.  It did not occur to her that the ambulance might stop when it saw a broken down vehicle on the side of the road with seven people standing near it and one of them waving wildly.  I don’t know if that is a felony or what, but she did not get arrested for that.  She was in the police car because all seven of them couldn’t fit into the tow truck.

At this point they had contacted two parties, one being my niece’s father, who was on his way to pick up 3 or 4 of them, and the other one being my sister’s husband’s oldest son, who had somehow loaded another van onto a trailer and was on his way to swap it out for their broken van.  The car got there first, and my mother, sister, wife, and the two children loaded in and started driving to the wedding.  Estimated GPS ETA: 4:50.  The two guys were left sitting at the rest area waiting for the truck swap at the truck stop.

You will be pleased to know that some of my family members did in fact make it to the church, with plenty of time to run into the restroom, change their clothes in a hurry, grab a program, and take their seats.  The husbands of my mother and sister arrived at the reception at around 8pm in the replacement van, and a good time was had by all.

So you see, I thought I had a really bad day on Friday, sitting in hellacious traffic for hours and hours on end, but in the end I just can’t compete with the kind of insanity that follows my mother around wherever she goes.  My life may seems nuts and exciting to you, but believe me, other than several people running out of the sanctuary screaming when I started my solo at the wedding, I got off easy.