My older niece was married two weeks ago, in Virginia, in the backyard brick garden of an old Colonial house. The wedding weekend was bookended by hellish rainstorms on the East Coast, canceling my flight down (I ended up on the train, which had been my preferred mode of travel in the first place) and delaying my return on Monday morning by six hours, which I spent in the bar at Dulles airport, watching Opening Day of this new baseball season. The wedding day itself was intermittently overcast with some sun, except for the moment when my niece and her fiancé were pronounced husband and wife, at which point – and I have witnesses to confirm this – the sun came out and shone on us all, and continued to shine through the rest of the day until it set in the evening, at which time I was dancing with my ex-brother-in-law to “Superfreak.”

I love these types of weddings, small, intimate, pretty, and ones where my role is negligible – the weird, arty, spinster aunt from New York who is assigned the occasional odd job, like setting out the guest book, holding cameras and bags so people can pose unencumbered in the wedding photographs, and herding the odd guest who tried to come in through the patio entrance to come in through the house and sign the guest book.

“I am just itching,” I said of these people attracted by the bunting and the flowers to enter immediately, instead of going through the house, “to go say `You have a hell of a lot of nerve, showing up here.'” It would have been amusing, this nighttime t.v. drama line of trite dialogue hurled at the amiable Virginia schoolteachers who composed most of the guest list (as my niece herself is an amiable Virginia schoolteacher).

My sister was appalled. “You said `hell’!” she hissed, gesturing at the minister, who was herself laughing merrily.

“She hears `hell’ all the time, I’m sure,” I protested.

“We’re Unitarians,” proclaimed the Unitarian minister. “We don’t believe in Hell.”

She was a trooper. In my experience, most of them are – the Methodist minister who was roped in to performing the funeral of my father, a complete stranger and reprobate, and the Presbyterian minister who oversaw my grandmother’s funeral service. Unlike my father, my grandmother was a lifelong devout churchgoer and volunteer, but by the time the Reverend Mason met her on his duty-bound visits, she was in her 90’s, in a nursing home, and in the habit of mistaking me with one of her long-deceased sisters, or perhaps a friend from a neighboring farm family who could be trusted to report the truth when she tugged on my sleeve, leaned in and whispered, “Tell me – are my parents still alive?”

Yet the Reverend Mason, who never knew her as she was, delivered a lovely eulogy based on the “dry bones” section of Ezekiel.

Similarly, the Episcopalian who performed my brother’s wedding service, in the garden of a winery in northern California, had to contend -- at the “dearly beloved, we are gathered here,” opening pitch -- with the sudden gearing-up din of a power saw, drilling and hammering from a nearby housing development. “We are here in the presence of a new home being built,” he announced to the wincing congregation. “And how appropriate.”

Nice save, Reverend!

These people are often depicted in movies as fire-and-brimstone lunatics, but I have found them entirely the opposite in my adult life.

“But what was the groom like?” insisted my 30 and 40-something friends back in New York upon my return.

“Well, I only met him once before the wedding,” I said. “But he seems like a really nice guy who loves her.”

This was met with the kind of swooning sighs you would expect had I said “He’s George Clooney/Colin Firth/Dylan McDermott!” or any number of descriptions of the tall, dark and handsome dashing bastards I dated when I was her age.

“Really?” my friends sighed. “He loves her?”

“They knew each other in high school and he found her again on MySpace.”

This sent them right over the edge, these sophisticated educated professional women of New York who are, just like the ministers, so unfairly depicted in the movies.

So occasionally, nice guys do finish first. As do nice girls, and ministers of the faith.

posted by Elizabeth at 3:18 PM