The other day I followed a link from Mightygirl over to Edith Meyer, who makes some of the most imaginative wedding cakes I've ever seen, and as I clicked through the cake pictures something unexpected happened to me. I started crying. Sneaky tears sneaking up on me. Typical! I get weepy at weddings, I think because the odds are so overwhelmingly against a lifelong relationship working out happily, and yet people keep wholeheartedly looking for the right person to love. And I think sometimes that person gets found. And then I cry.

So blah blah blah anyway: CAKE. The wayback-when morning of our wedding -- Jack and I got married in the back yard of the house we were renting an apartment in -- the back yard where we also buried three cats, Kitty, Stink, and Tarzan -- the back yard of the house that contains the apartment's bathroom wherein Jackson was born.

The food for our fifty-guest wedding was supposed to be delivered at 11:00 a.m. At 11:30 a.m. I called the bakery/catering place and said, Where's our food? And the woman on the phone said, What food? And I said, For my wedding! And she said, What wedding?

It turned out that the charming Frenchman who'd taken our order four months earlier, with whom we'd sat for over an hour talking about pates and cheeses and a three-tiered chocolate cake, had quit the bakery! And in order to completely fuck and embarrass the bakery he'd torn up a bunch of special orders that he'd written up, including ours. Great! I screamed at the woman on the phone. Screamed, I'm getting married today! This is MY WEDDING! NOW WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO DO ABOUT IT!

The ceremony was supposed to start at 1:00, and some food from the bakery showed up about 1:30. It wasn't what we ordered, but it was certainly good enough for a last-minute snack in the back yard. The cake, however. When our neighbor Lance heard about there being no wedding cake, he slipped off to the grocery store for supplies and came up with this:

That's "Jack vs. Eden" written in peanut M&Ms.; It was a reference to our wedding invitation, which was written up like a fight card but of which no example seems to survive, unfortunately. I might have one in an old file. I'll take a look.

So that was our wedding cake, like no other in the world, and we loved it. But I have to say, whenever I look at an unusual, fancy wedding cake, I think back to that motherfucking Frenchman and I want to give him a black eye.

And then I think, someday, some way, I'm going to have my wedding cake.

Also, for Ariel, here's a picture of our wedding shoes: