I’m on the run And trying not to get too Haggard BY CAITLIN SHETTERLY

I, like many people, spent a good portion of my summer attending weddings and baby showers, each of which I needed to recover from individually as my own life seemed further away from the reality of these rituals than ever before. Maybe it’s the fact that I spent the summer living with a friend (and out of a duffle bag) that made me feel less settled down than ever before. Now, it’s September and the renovations of my new Portland pad are almost finished. I hear tell via the painter who used to date my friend (this is one small town) that I’ll be able to see three lighthouses from the windows which gaze out over Portland Harbor. After the hijacked 9/11 smoke clears from the Republican convention of lies, I may actually be able to see a lighthouse or two.

This last wedding left me weary and depressed enough to jettison my cell phone and computer for five days and go camping with my mother in Canada. My college roommate, whom I hadn’t seen in over two years, got married to a guy I had never met. She had been living in Jerusalem and met him there as he was working (like Sisyphus) for peace in the region, and together they somehow built a relationship amid the constant strife and terror.

Driving to their wedding and playing Iris Dement(ed) over the motorcycle rumble of the broken resonator (the guys at Hamilton’s gave me this new word to play with) underneath my car (I wore my helmet just in case), I felt an odd mixture of happy and sad, a bitter-sweet feeling of life changing and wonder at who I’d see at the wedding and what I’d think of her husband, the wedding itself, and her new friends.

Part of me wondered how I’d feel about her.

I actually can’t remember much of our time living together in an attic apartment our senior year — and I think this says more about me than our friendship. I was writing my thesis on the effect of divorce on children in John Updike’s stories and Richard Ford’s novels, plumbing my own personal hell while healthily imbibing bottles of Glenlivet and packs of Gauloise cigarettes. I was trying, too, to hold onto an Englishman who was becoming an increasingly distant speck in my life. As sometimes happens in the lives of driven women, the thesis won out over the relationship, and my boyfriend, feeling permanently abandoned and unhappy, left me the day after I handed in my opus.

I fell apart, holding my cat tight and trying to survive, while my roommate mainly watched and tried to have fun with her last few months of college. And who can blame her?

At the wedding, I wanted, too much perhaps, to see success. Every detail appeared to be accounted for: a large, fancy rehearsal dinner, a huge tent, and at least 250 guests freely drinking and eating. At the rehearsal dinner I started to wonder how happy my friend would be when the toasts to her husband — even from his family — turned more into roasts more and more insulting as the night wore on and the alcohol poured.

This reminded me of the time the Englishman who killed me took me home to meet his very proper family and his mother asked me if I’d heard her son’s "trumpet" yet. I had no idea what she was talking about. He practically fell under the table. Laughingly, she explained that he was unusually endowed in the farting department.

After a few short hours of post-awful-dinner sleep, I awoke ready for what I hoped would be a perfect wedding. I fastened my helmet and roared up to the field where the wedding was to take place. Under clean blue skies the bride arrived in a convertible, carrying sunflowers and shaky in her skinny white dress. For the Tish — women gather around the bride and give her marriage advice, sing to her, dance, and tell her stories (I was sure to impart all my marriage wisdom) — she sat in a chair looking wan and nervous, as a wild circle of Israeli and Palestinian men danced towards her, carrying bottles of Black Label. My friend grabbed her mother’s hand until the circle was literally, and frighteningly, punctured by this raucous group of Middle Eastern men.

During the ceremony, the combined pack of wild men stood at the back of the seated guests, their shirts open, bottles being passed, and the occasional cell phone ringing with calls from far away. The wedding itself was trying so hard to be beautiful and idyllic — and fancy, really — that the disparity between the guests in their hats and Gucci shoes and the revelers who shook off all political and emotional constraints in order to celebrate created this strange undercurrent of tension. Sitting in my designated strappy wedding dress on a hay bale covered with linen, I wished I could stand with the men at the back with my shoes off and a bottle of Johnny.

Leaving the Carribeanesque coast of Prince Edward Island, my mother and I drove across New Brunswick listening to Merle Haggard: "I’m lonely but I can’t afford the luxury of having one I love to come along. She’d slow me down . . . for he who travels fastest goes alone." As my career becomes the largest part of my life and I travel more, invest more, and move faster I start to wonder if it’s more like she who travels fastest goes alone.

Caitlin Shetterly can be reached at bramhallsquare@yahoo.com