To Mr. and Mrs. Bakalars(ki)

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I'd like to preface this by saying that I'm not a huge fan of speaking in public--which really kind of conflicts with my innate addiction to attention. That aside, I've had some time to think about what I'd like to say here and the conclusion I've reached is that you have two options available to you: You can try to be clever or you can take the cop-out and stick with sentimentality. And, well... sentimentality is a lot easier.

 

Mike and I were born less than two months apart. I can say with absolutely no exaggeration that not only have we grown up together, but the earliest events I can even remember are of Mike and myself playing as kids. I remember his grandmother making us bubbles while we watched Sesame Street in Spanish through his family's satellite dish. I remember at 3 or 4 playing Lava, where you try to cross a room without touching the floor. I remember being fascinated by the control we thought we had over the mechanical boats you could ride at the Zoo in La Crosse. At Bluebird Springs I remember an entire day Mike and I spent pumping quarter after quarter into a Snow Brothers arcade machine. Once--on a road trip through West Virginia--I yelled at Mike for something that wasn't his fault and he spent the better part of an hour devestated, with a blanket over his head. Don't feel too bad, though--years later he'd get his revenge by punching me in the nose while pretending to be asleep, and I'm still the one carrying around guilt over the whole mess.

 

As kids we would beg, borrow and steal every chance we could to spend time together, and each time we would adapt to the updated changes in behavior and interests in the other one. These subtle changes sculpted and defined us, eventually leading us both to Milwaukee and where we are today. It shouldn't be too hard to understand that Mike has been and continues to be more of a Brother than a Cousin, and likewise Janet and Joe were always more like surrogate parents when I would stay there--which was as often as we could manage. The longest stretch we hit was one summer when we had an epic 4-week sleepover in Arcadia, doing little other than playing video games, jumping on the trampoline and scheming rides into town to rent movies, buy copies of the Weekly World News and get as much use out of our skateboards as we could while there was concrete available to use them on. We would also brave the wolves, woods and chupacubra's to camp in Mike's front yard frequently, although our idea of camping was to stretch an extension cable as far away from the house as we could so as not to be deprived of a television, VCR or Super Nintendo--the bare essentials--at any time.

 

Now that a decade has past since those times... nothing has changed. We get together a couple of times every week, and twice in the last few months Mike and Maya have shown up at our apartment with sleeping bags in tow, so we could stay up late watching cartoons, drinking juice boxes and playing video games. I think that says something--and no, not about our stunted maturity--but about how well Maya complements Mike. A lot of jokes get made that our favorite M&M's here are one indistinguishable unit, but the fact is that their interests and behaviors run parallel to each others.

 

When Mike and I first moved in with each other at the age of 19, I had just picked up a copy of an old board game we played as kids--Heroquest. This was the perfect game for twelve year old boys--it had a lot of rotating, movable pieces and was filled with generic fantasy stories and skeleton sword fights. Mike, who decided he was finally too old for this sort of game, rolled his eyes and refused to have anything to do with it. And it was less than two weeks later when I came home one night from work to find the game set up and well underway, with a new, surprisingly short girl in my living room and a surprisingly cleaned-up Mike, singing a brand-new tune about how New Girl is absolutely correct--without Heroquest, the sun wouldn't set. Needless to say, I didn't like what I was seeing and was convinced that nothing good would come of this new change. And--considering all of you have to listen to me speak right now, I might not have been entirely off.

 

But, other than the occasional save file mishap and an awkward stumble-upon or two, it only took me a month or so to realize that this girl wasn't leaving our couch anytime soon. Actually, after a few months my only irritation was that during all of the times only the two of us were there she would be too scared to wander out of hiding. For some reason, it took Maya another year and half to catch on to this, which was magically solved by the discovery of alcohol. Turns out a couple of car bombs and some Milwaukee's Best is a magical formula to make new best friends. With everyone. This also led to the discovery that spotting Maya in a crowded bar is like finding Waldo anywhere, though that's another story.

 

There are a lot of things I like to take credit for--and at least a few of them that are legitimate--but one of them that I can't lay claim to is any of today. Mike and Maya have poured everything over the past few months into this one event, and I have personally listened to them lose their minds over the details that go into these accommodations. Every time I doubted their work ethic and assumed they were using "Wedding Stuff" as an excuse to avoid dealing with our nonsense, all I had to do was wander over and listen to them for more than five minutes to realize how much effort they were actually expending. Even after their basement flooded and we spent the night trodding through nearly a foot of water and scum and cat poop--the next morning they were back to wedding planning. For those of you who don't know, Mike and Maya got engaged just over a year after they started dating, which means this Wedding has been half a decade in the works. One moment that I'll never forget and one that I've mentioned to a few people, was a little over a year ago when we were all together watching Scrubs and a just-engaged character said on his setting the date: "You know those lame-ass couples that get engaged but they never actually get married - they just cruise along, year after year, without making any real kind of commitment? I wanted to be one of those couples!" At that point, the M&M's both turned to each other and shared a look, and in less than three days a date had been set. After all of this planning now I'm not quite sure how they aren't completely sick of each other, but all you have to do is see how giddy they both get over holding each other's hands during the ceremony and it's obvious that even after all of these years, that excitement can't be dulled.

 

Mike, Maya--You're family and I love you both. I've got to say that between your love of Juice Boxes and your penchant for Veronica Mars-marathon sleepovers, you are easily now the strangest married couple I know. And I hope none of that changes.