I’ve been pretty hard on the urban life lately.  I say bad things.  Sorry.  It is just that I, well, mean them.  You know, like “……the city sucks!”  And stuff like that.  I really should be ashamed of myself but, well, I am not!  It still sucks!

Having firmly established my position on that, I have to ‘eat a bit of crow’,  recant, reverse myself, mea culpa kinda.  You know….it is really not all bad.

Worse, I also hafta apologize to all those who talk about weddings and that sort of thing.  I hate that sort of thing as a rule.  Moreover, I usually hate weddings.  I love the people, so I go.  But I hate the pomp and ceremony.  I am pretty bad.  Sally keeps me under control, barely.

But we went to S and C’s wedding yesterday.  We’ve known S for some time and Sal has been friends with her mom for twenty odd years.  Emphasis on ‘odd’.  Mom is a quirky duck who loves Sal and tolerates my existence.  She has had a lifetime of men and their ‘things’ and well, I am a man and I have things and so her tolerance levels are strained.  She likes me.  Kinda.  Not much.  It is not personal.  It is a ‘gender’ thing.  She has her things, too.

Anyway, we went to the ceremony and it was mercifully short.  Thirty minutes tops.  For that alone, it was a good wedding.  Then we walked a few blocks from the church to the Diva restaurant at the Met on Howe street.  The bar was open, the speeches mercifully short and the dinner fantastic!  The staff provided the best service and the best meal I have had in Vancouver and I have lived there a long time.  They really did it right.

And then we got to leave.  It really does not get much better than that.  And, because of that, I have to say, the city has a lot of drawbacks and we are not even aware of many of them.  But, of course, it has some things going for it and, I guess, when you get in to a routine, you fail to appreciate them.  I was definitely in a routine when we left the cul de sac.  I think I got a bit jaded.  You know, been there, done that.  Several if not dozens of times? 

I guess what I am saying is that I may have been a bit wrong in my blanket condemnation of the city I once called home.  It’s not all bad.    

I haven’t had such a pleasant, generous, sincerely happy group-in-public experience in a long time.  Not with that kind of service and food.  It was a real treat.  For a few minutes I actually appreciated the ‘sophistication’ of a well-run restaurant.  I was humbled a bit by the simple pleasures of something done very well.

Kudos on the whole event.  It was a very nice way of putting me right.