There's a statistical model for project management that's called the Critical Path Method, in which all of the sequential relationships for a project are laid out (you have to finish the structural work before you call in the plumbers and painters, to take a simple example) and you calculate the most efficient possible route through the various tradespeople and subcontractors. I was at a conference several years ago in which the story was told of a big Minnesota building contractor who had hired an Indian mathematician specifically to do critical path calculations. So for one particularly large job, the mathematician worked for several days and decided that the job would take, at minimum, 23 months. The contractor sighed, and said, "I hate the critical path method. It takes all the HOPE out of construction..."
A lot of jobs fall apart because some tiny element of the work, something that everyone takes for granted, never gets done. "Oh, I thought you were going to buy the caulk..." In this case, we wrote the text for the invitations five weeks ago. Mom reviewed the text three weeks ago, and suggested small changes, which I made. Nora and I changed the font color two weeks ago, bought matching ribbon, and did test prints. We made modifications, and took them to the printer, and bought stamps, and got the finished cards back about ten days ago.
But we don't have envelopes.
We've both been running full out at work, with the end of the semester and the looming accreditation reports and the out-of-town trips and the two job searches for which we each have to attend lots of candidate lunches and job talks. We finally got to a stationery store two days ago, in New York, in the midst of a dozen other things we were doing (like, for instance, continuing to shop for wedding clothes). We bought a sample envelope, but didn't have the chance to get to another store to check another group of possibilities. Our friends Grazyna and Howard went to that store on Sunday while we were choosing flavors of wedding cake and then driving back to Boston... They could have sent that sample to us today in FedEx, which would have cost as much as the hundred envelopes all together, but instead we decided that I'll look at the two samples, ours and theirs, when I go back down to New York again on Wednesday (I'm spending ten hours in transit and an overnight hotel stay for a one-hour meeting), and we'll buy the ones we want and I'll bring them back home on Thursday.
Envelopes. We've lost two weeks to the schedule because we don't have envelopes, and spent nine person-hours on a $35 choice. Perhaps we need a mathematician.
And there are a hundred of these things. Even though we have a wedding planner handling logistics like the food and the tent and the chairs and the dishes and all that, there are still innumerable little things like the reception dinner and the choosing of wine and the next cake testing and the construction of the engagement ring and the photographer and the guestbook and on and on and on. It's kind of funny, really, when you think about it from some degree of emotional distance that I can't always muster. Will and Kate had a royal staff of 400 conducting their event, and they still had an unpleasant child in all of their wedding pictures. (A friend of ours said, "they've found a troll to be their ring bearer..." The kid does kind of look like a small Shrek...)
In the end, there's always Vicki's variety store across the street from the town green. If we don't have a guest book, I can go over there and buy a spiral notebook and a BIC pen. We can get ice and beer and Doritos and Ben & Jerry's and M&Ms and have a party even if nothing else happens. [Editor's note: I have ALWAYS said that I won't throw a dinner party unless there's a pizza place to bail me out if the dinner burns. Mach's Pizza is only 20 minutes away from the wedding venue. Admittedly, that's a one-way trip, but the pizza is pretty good (organic local and sustainable ingredients on a thin wheat crust)]
[Editor's note #2: Nan said, "Nora! If anything goes wrong, this is Middletown! We'll take care of it."]
And somewhere around 6:00 on June 25th, Nora and I will be married. Y'all might have to eat with your fingers at the reception, but we'll be married. And nobody will care about anything else.
[Editor's note #3: HOPE? Remember Vaclav Havel... It's the certainty that this makes sense.]
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