Q-Buds: A Word from the Wise…

by J.G.C. Wise

I spent most of 2011 at weddings. If that seems like a gross exaggeration, well, it is. There’s probably going to be a lot of that in this post. Best to just accept it and move on.

Among the nine weddings that stole my weekends and vacation days last year was my own. Between the fact that neither Stephanie nor I are big fans of extravagant weddings and that we were fairly spent on nuptial celebrations by the time our own rolled around (seventh in sequence), there ended up being a few little details that we missed. One of these was a proper guestbook. I’d seen a number of different guestbook incarnations at my friends’ weddings. One couple, who had a vintage wedding theme, asked their guests to write personal notes on an old-fashioned typewriter, thus forcing all of us to realize how incompetent we would have been had we lived in the 1920s. Another couple provided notecards with the phrase, “Love is…” printed at the top, asking guests to share whatever love means to them. Not surprisingly, the ratio of sarcastic to serious responses was roughly equal.

As much fun as I’d had contributing to these glorious collections of cynicism and sentiment, it never once dawned on me to offer a similar thing at our wedding. Sure, we had a little notebook for people to scribble their names in as they entered the church, but as anyone who’s been married will tell you, those aren’t very much fun. They don’t offer guests the opportunity to share a favorite poem or give unsolicited words of matrimonial encouragement, and they certainly don’t provide a platform for guests to privately showcase their uncanny abilities to be smartasses. Our guestbook was so uninspired, we forgot to collect it from the church, and didn’t get it back until three months after our wedding.

What I didn’t notice during our reception, though, were the little slips of fabric my mother was so stealthily distributing, along with a collection of fabric pens, to everyone in the room. The orders were simple: Write a message to Josh and Stephanie, return the fabric and pens to my mother, and whatever you do, don’t let the bride and groom see you.

At a family gathering two months later, my mother quarantined my brother, Todd, his new wife, Jill, Stephanie and me in the living room of her home. Each couple was presented with an oversized bag, which I knew from experience either contained a quilt or another round of my belongings I’ve yet to remove from her crawlspace after seven years of living in Brooklyn. For better or worse, it was a quilt.

But it was not just any quilt. In addition to some carefully chosen fabrics, which reflected each couple’s personality, there were white, rectangular pieces interspersed throughout – the same slips of fabric she had handed out at both of our weddings. On closer examination, these rectangles contained black scrawls in various different hands, lengths, formats and designs. Essentially, my mother had turned our wedding quilts into guestbooks.

Before everyone starts ogling over the sentiment here, let’s be clear that this clever and fun idea did not come without its price. To start with, my mother distributed the quilt squares during the reception. After the open bar. In Brooklyn. Where people drink more than they eat. The results were tragically predictable.

The most popular category were the people who thought it would be fun to share their outstanding shamelessness by leaving us messages like, “Have sex on this quilt.” Whether or not our friends ever considered that my mother would be personally previewing every message, I’ll never know, but something tells me, comments like that were not oversights. They were intentional inflictions of emotional distress.

Accompanying the inebriation and the snark were the mysteries — those squares that bore no indication of the person leaving the message. Some had strange cartoons drawn in them while others made obscure references to things the authors probably thought would lead us right to them. I haven’t ruled out the idea that some of the wait staff at the restaurant thought it would be funny to participate, but generally speaking, I’m disturbed by how well our friends seem to think we know them.

But the best square by far was the one from “Aunt Joyce.” I don’t have an Aunt Joyce, and was a little surprised that there was a relative of Stephanie’s whom I hadn’t met, and somehow also didn’t remember from our wedding guest list. In my effort to be a supporting husband who doesn’t forget the names of his wife’s family members, I pointed to the square and said, “Look, here’s one from your Aunt Joyce.”

“I don’t have an Aunt Joyce,” replied Stephanie.

Apparently, Aunt Joyce belongs to Jill, yet somehow found her way into our quilt, despite our weddings being two months apart, and in two completely difference locales.

“Looks like someone was hitting the bottle while she put wedding quilts together,” I said to my mother with a smile.

“At least I can still cut my squares to the correct sizes even if I have been drinking,” she said, referring to my last disastrous quilting project. While most of you may read this as a top-notch zinger from my mom, I prefer to ignore her witty comeback, interpreting it instead as an admission of guilt. She never actually said she wasn’t drinking.

All in all, I like the idea of making a “guestbook” out of a wedding quilt. For all of the emotional scarring I’ve suffered at the hands of the lovable smartasses in my life, there is something unique and even heartwarming about having a quilt that we can display in our living room, perpetually sharing the memories of that most special day in our lives, even if it means that everyone will wonder, after they’ve already run their fingers over each precious square, if we have, in fact, had sex on that quilt.

In the interest of sharing the awkwardness, I think I’ll just let them keep guessing.

J.G.C. Wise:

Currently hailing from Brooklyn, NY, J.G.C. Wise (formerly Josh Cacopardo)  has made quilts since 1999 when he was unwittingly duped into a project one spring morning. Most of his projects since then have been of epic proportions, namely because he likes big quilts, complicated patterns and generally doesn’t budget enough time to finish anything.