Royal Wedding

We stumbled into the Royal Wedding yesterday morning. I mean the TV broadcast, of course - not the real thing. (My sister told me today that she has determined via ancestry.com that we are 40th generation descendants from Henry III - but thank God we didn't get invited as really I had nothing to wear).

The kids and I had somehow failed to register that the wedding was scheduled for yesterday, but we were all excited to find that the usual local morning news team from Plattsburgh had been displaced by K & W. I got ready for work and school to the sound of prayers and hymns and vows, stealing looks at K & W, and Elton John, and the Queen and the top, bottom, sides of Westminster Abbey while I brushed my hair and teeth and packed Shack's backpack.

And wasn't it all lovely? When we talked about it at work, everyone was smiling. The newscasters were smiling when they reported it all. I stopped for coffee at Green Mountain Coffee Roasters and the staff had a handwritten sign on the counter extending best wishes to "our friends Will and Kate."

I am sure that the usual too-smart, too-cool, too-egalitarian bores are taking all this adulation as evidence that the rest of us are even stupider, more gullible and more venal than they had previously believed. But screw them. Some of them are boors, all of them are tedious, and that is worse than almost anything they can say about us.

Anyway, it got me thinking again about the Queen. (Sorry, I'll try to be brief!) With my Canadian legal education, I was more or less forced to learn about the centrality to the common law of the English monarch. She is - among other things, of course - a stand-in for the whole country. She is them. They are her. (Sort of like, you know, the Jesus model). I don't think this is a notion that gets a lot of official reinforcement these days, but it is bred in the bone over there and it will out. Like when the Heir Apparent gets married to a beautiful young woman. Hurray for all of us! Even all of us who just wish them well from afar.