There is a wedding

coming up in the clan on Saturday. Middle Cat's eldest is getting married. 
He's a doctor and his partner is a nurse. We all think he's a lucky boy because we think she is a lovely girl. 
But, I'll be glad when the day is over. Middle Cat will be glad when the day is over.
It will be a big day for the Senior Cat. His two grandchildren in another state were married without him being there. They married after the death of  his wife and he simply didn't feel able to travel at the times they were married. So, this is the first and probably only wedding of a grandchild. If Middle Cat's youngest gets married then it will be in another state and the Senior Cat says he is too old to travel away from home for a night now. 
I can understand that. He feels safer at home now. 
But on Saturday he will go to a wedding. We hauled his one and only suit out of the hanging bag in his wardrobe. He hadn't worn it since he attended a funeral about eight or nine years ago. It needed to be altered. He has lost weight and changed shape since then. He needed a new belt. Middle Cat dealt with those things. I have dealt with things like making sure his best white shirt is pressed and that his clan crest tie is clean and that those fine black woollen socks are the new pair, not the old pair I darned. 
The wedding is at the zoo. Yes, I know it is a strange place to get married but Nephew and Nephew's Partner are animal lovers and it solved the problem of Greek-Orthodox or Catholic ceremony. The Senior Cat, usually a traditionalist in such matters, thinks the idea is rather nice. It's not that we like zoos particularly but we see them as essential for such things as breeding programs in efforts to help save the wildlife diversity of the planet. 
There will be a reception in the evening. I have warned the Senior Cat - fresh batteries in your hearing aids! 
He will be the oldest person there by far. Even if Middle Cat's father-in-law was still alive the Senior Cat would be a decade older. Over the past couple of days he has made mention of his own wedding. It was a tiny affair. He says he was "very young and very naive". Perhaps he was although he was 26. It was just after the war. There were "about 18 or 20 guests" he thinks - including his parents, hers and the wedding party. The wedding breakfast was afternoon tea of the simplest sort. Money was tight. There was petrol rationing. My parents had a "honeymoon weekend" at a beach about 20km from here. It was all they could afford.   
Nephew Cat and his partner are paying for most of the wedding themselves. It's the way they wanted to do things. I have no doubt it will be nice but it won't be as outrageously lavish as many weddings. It won't be like Middle Cat's wedding - which was held in a Greek-Orthodox church for the sake of her mother-in-law and at which there were about 400 guests because the Cypriot side of the family insisted that "everyone" had to be invited. Nephew Cat refused to contemplate that - although some of his cousins may think differently when their time comes. 
The Senior Cat's wedding was one extreme perhaps and Middle Cat's wedding was another. (Although, to be fair, her father-in-law did the catering along with his brothers and it cost them a quarter or less of what it might have cost as a result...and they did it for the other children of that generation too.)
But I still look at all this and think that, if I had to get married, prowling quietly into a registry office might be the way to do it. That way I wouldn't need to "dress up".