99 Percent: Two Weddings and A Monkey (Part 1)

The city was in a fever. It was the month of the MassKara and traffic swelled to horrendous proportions everywhere. Not helping matters any, the sun beat down on every available surface, melting asphalt and frying stagnant dura matter. Erupting tempers were rife, as were drunken knife fights in the plaza at sundown. It was a wonder to certain irate locals why tourists kept flocking to this city every October, despite the traffic and itinerant vendors, despite the heat and violence at happy hour, year after year after year.

At the home front, the flurry of activity was building up, as well. It was the 18^th, the very height of the MassKara festival. It was also Nat's wedding day.

She arrived from Manila a couple of weeks before that, taking a leave from her sub-specialty stint as an OB-Gyne-Ultrasound internist to join with her one true love. Atch and family breathed collective sighs of relief, the youngest was finally settling down.

Like a mini-reunion of sorts, my husband's teeming cauldron of kinfolk came pouring in from all four corners of Christendom. We managed to stuff some of them into the already tourist-laden hotel where the wedding was to take place that afternoon, and the rest we crammed into our two cramped apartments like so many flopping sardines.

Apart from the mad scramble to get suitcase-rumpled suits, barongs and dresses pressed, there was an equally hushed moment when we all held our breaths as Atch carefully inserted Eli into his elegant satin coin-bearer outfit. He had previously threwn passionate tantrums at all his fittings, pawing at the shiny material. He rolled on the floor at the wedding rehearsal, as well.

Atch turned the hotel room's air conditioning full blast on our diaper-clad son, and when he was sufficiently covered in goosebumps, eased him into his costume. Eli was surprisingly compliant. Until he left the frigid zone.

Meanwhle, Woog's fingers and feet were literally everywhere he could get them into. He prowled the hotel lobby, shaking the silver-cast condiment containers, cruising the floor on the bellboy's baggage trolley, picking pebbles from the landscaped garden and dropping them surreptitiously into the blossom-bedecked pool.

It was when he almost tipped over one of the tall crystal centerpieces brimming with calla lilies that I gave in to my itchy finger compulsion to give his femoral artery a hearty tweak. He subsided momentarily, eyeing me with wounded sheep eyes, but only until he took fraternity with a spoon and fork not five minutes later and discovered the lovely tinkling sounds that wine glasses make.

Atch took over at this point, herding the boys away from livid temperaments and melting make-up. By the time the wedding march was set to start, three of them looked like drunken survivors from a stag party.

The wedding planner and her minions separated the whole messy gaggle of entourage and relatives, and cordoned everyone off in the sweltering garden where we awaited curtain call.

In the end, Nat's wedding was a breathtaking vision of bubbles and butterflies and smoke. Strains of violin music pierced through the mist of our tears as my ethereal sister-in-law floated down the aisle to meet her destiny...