Bramhall Square The wedding tsunami BY CAITLIN SHETTERLY

I am in the wedding season of my life. I’ve finally hit that magical age when marriage seems to be happening to everyone I know. Add a boyfriend to your life, and you get weddings squared. Recently Cowboy and I attended one of his distant relatives’ wedding, and just as the bride was about to hike towards the throng of people waiting in late afternoon sun, the woman in front of me turned to her friend and loudly announced, "You know she’s three-and-a-half-months pregnant, don’t you?"

Can’t someone make weddings more convenient? Like have them at Starbucks and do it while we drink coffee and check our email? My Aunty B says the most dignified thing to do is to elope.

To me, our culture seems more obsessed than ever before. We have a 43-percent divorce rate, a war abroad where actual people are dying and, yet, we want pageantry. Thanks to US, we are now privy to the wedding plans of Paris & Paris and Nicole Ritchie & DJ AM. But maybe these ladies have it right — have weddings become another career and marketing opportunity? Or is it just an excuse to throw a big party and wear Vera Wang?

Some people love it so much they do it twice. The Parises apparently plan one wedding stateside and a second in Europe. I have a friend who is also planning one New World, one old. But what the hell happens at the second one? Is wedding number two just a reenactment of number one? Are the already marrieds just stars in their own weird play? Are they being kind to family or just cruel?

This August, my mother and I headed north to Cape Breton, Canada, for a wedding. This wedding was, in the wedding pyramid, near the top of the importance list because it was that of my childhood neighbor, wedding a lovely Canadienne. This is the first wedding I have been to where I actually felt a little nervous. Maybe it was just that I had to toast my friend in front of hoards of Canadians I had never met. Of course my nerves might also have been a little fried from camping the night before in a wind tunnel next to a beach that in the dark sounded like a tsunami was about to hit (or as my mother calls it a Two-Sue-Nah-Me). It kept me up all night thinking about how completely terrible it would be to die that way — until I asked my mother (also lying awake as our tent tried to fly away) what she was thinking and she told me not to worry because if something dangerous were about to happen, "The people would come in their white trucks that say Canada on them."

I can’t really think of anything less comforting than this. Somehow, despite my opposition to our President’s use of the American military, I’m hoping for the Air Force rappelling out of helicopters in the case of a tsunami. Not some Chevy with a maple leaf on its side.

Come wedding night, I managed to sail through the toasts with aplomb and I went back to the night of catching up with friends and old flames I had known in different lives from Paris to Providence to New York and back to Maine.

Later, when I crawled into my sleeping bag and began the night’s slide into the far right corner of our tent, I thought about the simple elegance of the vows I had just witnessed. Maybe it was the fear of death by tsunami the night before, or just sleeping out in bracing night air, but something like hope stirred in me.

Not hope for myself, really, but instead I admired the courage it took my friend to make this leap so honestly in front of many, with such elegance and dedication.

Bramhall Square runs every other week, and Caitlin Shetterly can be reached at bramhallsquare@yahoo.com