All suited up in eighty degree heat. Standing in the Alpena Sportsmen’s Club drinking because I’m hung-over, and all I want to do is get through the rest of this thing. The wedding. The reception. The celebration. The party.

People talking all around me. Old friends turned into acquaintances, and I feel like I don’t know anybody anymore. Like all of us are faking our way through the night. Through life. Nothing is as it seems. We talk about old times, shake hands, give hugs, and make promises to keep in touch, knowing we never will.

I lean against the bar, knock back my vodka tonic and order another.

All around the place there are green and white decorations. Streamers, flowers, bows. Tablecloths, candles, napkins. It’s a nice look. Clean. Crisp. Proper. The bartender fills my cup and slides it across the bar. A green and white sign hangs from the ceiling. It’s so big and bright, it’s dizzying.

CONGRATULATIONS MIKE AND SARA!

There’s cheering in the corner of the room. The bride and groom are shoving cake into each other’s face. Laughing. Teasing. Playing it up for the crowd. Loving the moment. Licking frosting, unaware of a past or a future. Brushing away crumbs, knowing only Now.

I drink and walk outside.

Some old timers are gathered together. Smoking and drinking. Mumbling and nodding. Standing around a three-foot-tall, iron bear. An impressive, intricate figure whose beauty is lost on functionality. It is an ashtray. Mouth open wide, iron saliva stringing from big, mean, iron teeth with muscles bulging under a smooth iron coat, as powerful arms stretch upward holding an iron bowl of butts and ashes.

I can’t look at it for long because all I keep thinking is that it’s a damned shame somebody’s put so much into making an ashtray.

I turn away from the bear and the old men, and I see my reflection in the window glass. I’m all dressed up. Wide and distorted. Thinning blond hair. Stubby fingers fidgeting and shaking around a plastic cup. My short dark legs are stuck into the concrete, but my body sways. I'm a tired groomsman. A drunken figurine. A man in a suit playing a role in a tradition that is not mine, aware that what I've become is something for someone else to see. I am shadow and light, a minute in the moment, part of a day of time to be remembered. I'm a body in the background of a snapshot. A flash in someone's memory. Part of the reflection of the world. I'm looking at it, and it is looking at me, and I know there's got to be more to all of it, to all of this, so I look away from what's in front of me.

I stand in the fading daylight and gaze out over the blue-tipped grass toward the pond.

The water’s smooth. Swallows sail and loop, turning barrel rolls and skimming the surface. Cattails and lily pads. Evergreens and birch trees. The sky and everything under it reflects and shines in the water like mirrored glass.

I’m thinking about asking the old timers if the pond is stocked with fish, but one of them starts this long, hacking cough, so I keep my trap shut. The raspy hacking turns to gasping breath. The old timer bends over, veins bulging and snaking under his skin, face going red then blue. He is suffocating. I step forward to help, but his buddies raise their hands to stave me off.

"Don’t mind him! Stosh does this all the time!"

But by now, Stosh is on one knee pounding his chest, eye to eye with the iron bear, begging for breath.

One of his friends looks at his watch.

Stosh pounds his chest some more then starts this deep, lung-rattling growl.

Another buddy pipes up.

"He’s pulling out of it!"

I sip my drink and fiddle with my tie. There’s drinking, cake eating, merry-making going on just inside the doorway, but at my feet, a man moves closer to dying.

Seeing this has me feeling light-headed, hot, and just when I think I’m about to pass out and join Stosh, he wretches up the most god-awful, chunk of black phlegm I’ve ever seen. He spits it onto the ground.

One of his buddies slaps him on the back.

"Buck up, Stosh!" he shouts.

Silvery threads of spittle stretch and hang down from Stosh’s purple lips. Watery-eyed and sweating, he wipes his mouth on his sleeve, and he rises.

Before his face can even regain its color, he’s giving me a wink, and lighting a cigarette.

"I need a drink!" he bellows.

Another drink sounds fine. I drain my cup and glance inside toward the bar. The band strikes up a real hum-dinger of a tune, and I imagine the dancing’s about to rip to life. Soon the place will be hotter than hell, filled with dancing bodies, and people will be moving in ways that are amazing and obscene. Dads shaking hips. Moms gyrating. Grandparents doing the chicken dance.

Watching people is usually my favorite part of a wedding reception, but tonight I don’t feel like watching. Maybe it’s the hangover within my buzz. Maybe it’s the heat. Maybe it’s something I don’t even know. But what I do know is I’m single, and I’m at a wedding, and I sure as hell don’t want to take part in the goddamned garter toss.

There’s always some fat-assed, ugly broad with the personality of a tree stump just chomping at the bit to catch the damned bouquet, and my idea of fun isn’t trying to slide a garter belt up some monster’s ham-hock. So when I start to feel like it’s nearing garter tossing time, I do my best to avoid the whole situation.

One time I spent half an hour sitting on a banquet hall toilet, and I didn’t even have to go. I just sat there staring at the stall door. FUCK MARRIAGE, it said in thin, scratchy letters, and I imagined some pissed off receptionite, drunk off his ass, scratching those words into the metal door, making some sort of bold statement because he had been hurt, because he was jealous, because he was alone. FUCK MARRIAGE, it said, and I thought that was just fine because I can’t count how many times I wanted to take my jackknife out of my pocket and scratch FUCK THE GARTER TOSS into a wall, into a door, into a mirror.

Stosh and his buddies are ready to head to the bar, and I’m about to follow when this zillion-year-old sack of bones comes creak-swaying out of the Sportsmen’s Club. She’s wearing a jet-black wig, about a half-gallon of paint on her face, and she’s smiling crazy. The best part is she’s wearing this real sexy dress. A purple one that plunges nearly all the way to her belly-button, showing off tan, saggy skin. She’s got a plastic champagne glass shaking to hell in one hand and a cigarette burning up in the other.

"Which one of you old bastards is gonna to dance with me?" she shouts.

The old timers hoot and holler and laugh until old Stosh

starts hacking again. They stand around him slapping him on the back, telling him to "hang in there" and "buck up," until he hacks up another chunk. As he gasps for breath, the purple-dressed bombshell takes him by the arm.

"At least this one won’t get away!" she cackles, leading him inside.

Stosh’s buddies laugh and follow.

When they leave, I feel like all the energy’s been knocked out of me. I want to sit down, but there isn’t a chair anywhere, so I lean against the building and take deep breaths. I’m 30, but feeling like  103. My chest feels tight. My face burns. My mouth is stone dry. It’s because I’ve been drinking. It’s because I’m tired. Tired of this place. Tired of the phony smiles and cordial bullshit. Tired of tradition and people and everything not being what it seems.

The iron bear’s at my feet, so I start looking at it again. I can’t get over how detailed it is, how real it looks, but then I realize I’ve never seen a real bear. I’ve fished, hunted, camped, and spent hours in the woods, yet I’ve never seen a real, live bear. It gets me feeling kind of sad because I think maybe the only bear I’ll ever see is if I end up going to the zoo some day. And I don’t ever want to go to the zoo if I can help it. All those caged animals can’t be happy. But maybe I’ll have a wife and some kids one day, and I’ll have to go to the zoo, just like I’ll have to do a million other things I don’t want to do. But I hope to hell I can see a real bear before then. That way if I do end up going to the zoo with my kids, I can tell them how good it is to see an animal in the wild. That their old man was a hunter. A fisher. And one day while tracking a whitetail, or setting up camp, or running a trout line, I ran into a bear. A big one. One so big and fearsome that the only thing I could do was stand still and stare it down. It would be a great story. One they could go to school with and tell to their friends. And maybe even tell their own kids one day.

I put my empty cup over the iron bear’s snout and walk toward the pond. The sky is doing funny things with color and texture. Treetops are filled with pink light. Thin, wispy clouds are streaked blue and orange. The grass, trampled earlier by the wedding ceremony, has straightened itself out and is reaching toward the sun.

It’s hard to believe that only a few hours earlier I was one of the cows trampling the grass. Walking down the makeshift aisle with a pudgy, tree stump bridesmaid on my arm. She’d overdosed on tanning and was looking like a gigantic rotisserie chicken. I was glad I’d hit the bottle first thing in the morning, otherwise I wouldn't have made it.

"Do you have a girlfriend?" she’d asked, as we readied for our walk.

I was roasting in my suit, feeling I might collapse, and my biggest concern was getting to the reverend at the end. A young, chubby, bearded man in a little motorized cart. No shit. I kid you not. The reverend, the mighty master of love and ceremony, was in a little motorized cart. Like the ones you see at grocery stores. Always lined up and ready to go, but hardly anyone ever using them. I wanted to laugh, probably because deep down I’m a mean bastard, but mostly because it was just crazy. He was so young. So bearded. So chubby. Sitting there, hands on his handlebars, Bible in his lap, smiling at us like we were the husband and wife to be.

It was steaming hot, and I needed a drink. I wanted to sit down. Wanted this thing over, but there I was with an overdone bridesmaid on my arm asking me if I had a girlfriend.

"No, I’m single. Do you?"

"Do I what?" she asked.

"Have a girlfriend?"

Her big, dark, dead-cow eyes came to life. But only for a second.

"Do I look like a lesbian?"

"I don’t know. What does one look like?"

I was trying to be funny, but trying to go deep, too, beyond the reception, our costumes, the way we were supposed to BE, but it wasn’t working. I was too tired, a little buzzed up, and sweating like mad.

"Are you all right?" she asked.

"I’m fine. How are you?"

"You smell like beer."

"Sorry," I said.

She fell quiet. So did I. We stood and waited for the flutist to start it up. A flutist. The first goddamned wedding ever that had a flutist play the wedding march. A young girl. About 14. Tall and lanky. Her body still deciding whether it wanted to be a boy or a girl, but she had forced the issue and her hair was all done up, and her face was caked in makeup, not wanting at all to be a girl but to be a woman instead. Seeing the flutist helped me forget how uncomfortable I was because I started thinking about her and all the things she probably thinks she’s gone through, and all the shit she will go through, and I was feeling connected to her. The way it sometimes is when you just sit and think of someone else.

But then the body on my arm spoke up.

"You really stink! How many drinks do you need to get through a wedding?"

"Seven feels about right."

"Why do I always end up with the losers?"

Now she was just being mean.

"There’s no ending up, sister. We’re all losers."

That really threw her for a loop.

"Whatever. Can’t you just take me down the aisle?"

I’d missed the rehearsal, so I was winging the whole thing. Not that there was much to wing. A walk down the aisle, even when the wedding is outside and there really isn’t an aisle, isn’t a big thing. I’ve been walking on two legs since I was a kid. It was being there I should have rehearsed for. Seeing the Sportsmen’s Club, the decorations, the young reverend in his motorized cart. And maybe the flute player would have been at the rehearsal too, and I could have seen her. Maybe as a kid being a kid. Not wearing women’s hair and women’s makeup. Not trying to be anything at all. But sometimes rehearsals and seeing things before they happen isn’t a good thing. Sometimes it doesn’t matter, so it’s best to have a few drinks, and let your feet fall where they may.

Mine were walking down the aisle. One foot in front of the other.

My sweetie-pie bridesmaid was holding my arm too tight. She had put on this wide, toothy grin, and was winking and waving at people like she was the queen of some damned parade. I tried to forget she was there, and did my best to stay on the straight and narrow, but out of nowhere a little boy ran into the aisle.

He was round-faced. Had curly blond hair. Was wearing a shirt and tie. He’d found a small birch twig and was holding it up toward me, as if it were a gift. No parent or sibling ran to claim him, and I heard a few gasps in the crowd, like the kid was doing something really horrible, so as casually as I could, I stopped and opened my hand. The bridesmaid started playing it up of course, trying to goo-goo talk with the kid, even posing for snapshots people were taking, but this kid was focused on only one thing. Me.

His eyes were deep blue. Eyes that when I looked into them made me stop and feel the inner workings of myself. Like a timepiece becoming aware of its parts. Face on the outside. Guts on the inside. Gears, cogs, and wheels turning, clicking, driving hands on the surface, sweeping them around to tick off time, as if life doesn’t matter. And for a few seconds everything stopped for synchronization. My guts rolled and warmed. My mind lit up, and this little kid had me. He had IT. That something that makes us know there's more to this than meets the eye. He put the birch twig in my hand. Smiled and reached for me to hold him.

My lovely bridesmaid took the twig and tossed it aside. She shook her finger at the boy, "Run along now, honey!" she said.

I thought I was going to be sick when we crossed the finish line, but I wasn’t. I stood my ground and waited for the other cows. I searched the crowd for the kid, but when I knew I wouldn’t see him again, I turned and stared blindly at the pond, counting the minutes until the open bar.

Now I’m a bit buzzed up, but sort of down and dying, and I’m standing at the edge of the pond. Watching water striders, water beetles, and a doomed dragonfly. On his back, curling his long blue body into a horseshoe and spinning. Another dragonfly is in the air above him, hovering. Waiting, it seems. I crouch down to get a better look, and a frog leaps into the water. It's long-legged and sleek and glides under the surface until it disappears into the shadows of the lily pads. The hovering dragonfly rockets away. The one in the water stops still, laid out flat against the water. Big eyes watching the wide sky.

I hear something in the grass behind me. I stand and turn to look, and I see a one-legged goose. Hopping and balancing. Pecking the ground. The left foot and part of the leg are gone. All that's left is a black nub that cannot reach the ground. It is disturbing and fascinating. Sad but true.

I approach slowly, talking to the one-legged goose.

"It’s okay, old boy. Just saying hi."

The goose pecks furiously. Takes in grass, bugs, and seeds. Tosses aside cigarette butts, foil gum wrap, and confetti.

"What happened to you, little fella?"

I’m about as close as I can get. Crouched down an arm’s length away when the goose rears its head and takes a shot at me. I’m startled and fall backward. The goose stands tall, hissing. He is all the world’s strength balancing on one leg. He hops forward and stretches his wings, and I am able see the rest of his grace. A small, deformed wing beating with fury. The goose hisses once more, then is calm. I am still, and I wait. He moves his head side to side as he looks me over. When he’s had his fill of me, he hops away to the edge of the pond. He searches the shoreline and the shallows, as if looking for something, then moves into the water and swims slowly in one-legged circles

He is evolution’s answer. The food chain’s broken link. A length of leg. A broken wing. A moment of life given to fate. And suddenly, I know there are fish in the pond. I can feel them in the air, sense them in the cool grass, and I know that they are here. Bluegill and bass. Perch and carp. And somewhere below the surface, a northern pike cruises the bottom, goslings deep in its belly. In its blood. Pushing gills in and out.

There is a big splash in the pond, and when I look to the place where the dragonfly floated, it is gone. The surface rings with ripples. The goose honks then struggles to swim straight, heading toward the opposite shore. I sit and I breathe because that's all there is to do.

Behind me, the celebration comes alive. The music of the reception pours outside, rises then falls, and there is a loud drum roll, and I know that people are gathered in a circle around a man and a woman, a boy and a girl, two people put in the middle, playing their parts in the big show. He's kneeling down. She's pulled up her dress. Hands slide the garter up and up. The crowd laughs and roars with each little inch, everyone connected, existing in the same moment of time.

Except the goose and me.