Who writes things like that?

Sunday was M & K’s wedding shower, up on a fine, sunny deck near Park City.

I’m new to this mid-20s-everyone-gets-married-thing; remember, I’m not from Utah, where high school sweethearts marry prior to commencement to ensure proper prom relations.

I’ve only attended one “friend” wedding, a high school buddy, who since marriage, has fallen off of the edge of this flat earth and descended into a world of large HD TVs, mortgage payments and cleaning up after a small dog somewhere in southern New Hampshire. Now, though, it’s all exploding. The friends are lining up, two-by-two, ready to hop on this great ark of marriage and purchase property as quickly as possible. I didn’t get the memo. Apparently, now’s the time to be a grown-up.

Q: David, what do you want to be when you grow up?
A: Taller.

To be fair, I have married friends, particularly here in Salt Lake, where many of the people I spend time with are older, so really, I am referring to those friends that I grew up with or went to school with. M & K have their wedding this August at Alta – which I am truly looking forward to, actually – and already I have three college friends booking me for next year. Strangely, of the six people involved in the 2006 ceremonies, five live in New York City. Not one of the weddings takes place there; instead, I’ll be racking up the frequent flyer miles to Florida, Georgia and Maine.

With that first high school friend wedding, I was as uninvolved as one could be. I accepted the invitation, brought my friend Amanda, and together, mocked the traditional nature of it all. Now though, it’s like cutting through 401K forms for the first time - it's a thick, slow process. I used to live with M & K and while I am by no means involved, it sometimes feels like I am, just because I am much closer to them.

Before this weekend, I hadn’t attended a wedding shower. I was utterly confused when I received the invitation: I thought these were only for women. I have to buy them another gift? What does one wear to this type of event?

In the end, it was a great day. The food was excellent and I walked away with a sun-kissed (if not sunburned) nose, but in retrospect, I deserve to be mocked. While I feel good about my actual gift, I had no idea what to include in the card, or even which card to choose. It turns out that there’s a very limited pot of wedding shower cards and most seem to feature Precious Moments characters or set a couple of eight-year-old kids wearing mock dress and tux in faded color in front of a sepia backdrop. The idea of writing something about their life together also seemed a bit cliché and I’m glad that I didn’t include that — it seemed to be on every other card.

In the end though, mine was probably worse. I settled on a very cool blank card and wrote something like:

Congratulations! Enjoy the gifts. Enjoy the shower. Don’t get too wet.