All This Activity and a Wedding

This summer's been happening for me, no doubt, and not just in Boston--in North Carolina, too, or at least it will be. I'm going to a wedding of two of my college friends this weekend and should be reunited with many more. There will be a lot of new faces too, I imagine, because the bride and groom have extended family and other friends that I haven't met.

How do I know this couple? They were both very active in the University of Virginia Hillel when I was an undergraduate there, and when I started coming more often to events my second year, the three of us got to know each other and became friends. Ariella, the bride, used to call me "First-year Jonny," at first because I used to get rides to events with the first-year students. (UVA has this tradition where freshman are called first-years, sophomores second-years, and so forth.) Both she and Lior, the groom, lived on the Lawn their final year in college, and a few times I came up to visit and went to basketball or football games with them, I having graduated a year before them. We celebrated Lior's 21st birthday after one of the basketball games. The two lived in Israel at the same time and traveled around together, visiting my six-week resident town of Toledo, Spain, though I wasn't there at the time. I got a postcard from somewhere they traveled to.

So you see, we have a history. And on Sunday, probably at least a couple hundred people will gather to watch these two wed, break the glass and dance the night away.

I leave Boston in a few hours for this journey.