Posted by Jim at July 30th, 2005

Today I went to a wedding. Unlike last year’s weddings, this one passed without any risk of violence, immigration related problems, or obscene songs played at the reception.

This left me free to think about other things. Once upon a time people threw rice at weddings. Rice symbolized prosperity and fertility. Recently people stopped throwing rice, having learned that the stuff gets eaten by birds, expands in their stomachs, and kills them.

People must now find substitutes. At this wedding, they blew bubbles.

Rice makes sense as a symbol. Especially in cultures where rice is a staple food, rice is intuitively connected to prosperity and fertility.

Bubbles, by contrast, aren’t intuitively connected to anything (except perhaps Lawrence Welk and champagne). They are slick on the outside, hollow within, and pop instantly when they encounter a problem. These aren’t exactly the qualities you want out of a marriage.

I can only assume that bubbles aren’t supposed to symbolize anything themselves. They symbolize rice.

Coming home was more eventful than the wedding itself. We arrived home to discover that a car had run the yield sign near our house, hitting another car, and totaling both. Thus we arrived home to find that we’d missed the fire trucks and the ambulance, but, were in time to watch four police cars full of cops interview the drivers and other witnesses. We also got to watch the tow trucks pull the cars away.

Abby and Rebecca got to watch the whole thing and found it fascinating.