Devastating

My years of inveterate reading of the Weddings & Celebrations section of the NYTimes has paid off exactly twice. The first time can be described as the grotesque pleasure in reading about a girl I vaguely knew in high school, the daughter of a famous television news personality, a girl I maybe talked to once but who, with no explanation, haunted my thoughts in an annoying and pointless way, and the validation of unexpectedly reading about the dumb and pointless story of her eventual courtship and betrothal. The way their families met at some ski resort, if not literally in a hot tub, the way she fainted at their first meeting because she had forgotten to eat, the whole stupid bourgeois drama finally resolving why, for what mysterious and inexplicable reason, this girl's existence kept surfacing in my memory. Aha! Finally! That is why! My idiotic brain can now randomly obsess about some other pointless thing lodged in my memory for no (yet) apparent reason!

The second time was today, when I read this story of the most devastatingly adorable tale of nerd love, particularly for the quote, from the bride, describing a period of time when the couple had worked together at the Met but had not known each other until they worked together again at the Jewish museum:

It was a dress rehearsal of sorts: a stage on which we ultimately missed our cues.

I like especially how the Times writer uses this quote to start a new paragraph, as if it were some kind of topic sentence pertaining not to the concrete accident of their not meeting, but to some abstract idea of life as a whole in which we always miss our cues, the characters we are assigned to play never coming together as put down in the script. And that tragic fact - thrown out there so blithely, so nonchalantly, about 3/4 of the way down in the story - being just another sentence in the larger and equally tragic/ordinary whole.