"My advice to you is get married: if you find a good wife, you'll be happy; if not, you'll become a philosopher, " says Socrates. Three years ago, in order not to be become a philosopher, my mother's sister, Aunt Deniz, decided to get married to her husband, whom she had been in love with since the third grade. "We both went to different high schools and colleges in different cities and then, we worked in different cities," said my aunt, adding that they saw each other for the first time after many years at my uncle's wedding. After the wedding night, they started dating, got engaged and got married. Although it looks like everything went smoothly, indeed, their wedding was a series of unfortunate events.

Three months before the wedding, my aunt ordered her wedding dress from the same tailor my mother also ordered her wedding dress. She got the dress a week before the wedding, and she looked gorgeous with her white mermaid cut wedding dress that fit closely to the body from the chest to the knee and then flared out to the hem. On the morning of the wedding day, Aunt Deniz, my mother, my grandmother, my cousin, my uncle's wife and I went to the wedding salon early in the morning in order to prepare and support Aunt Deniz for the night. Her preparation room was full of people who were probably hair stylists; their equipment and colorful flowers in pink vases everywhere. We left Aunt Deniz to professional hands and saw her
after six hours.

Thirty minutes until the start of the wedding, my mother told Aunt Deniz that it was time for her to put on her wedding dress. My mother took my aunt to an inner room and when they turned back, what we saw was completely different than what we saw a week before. She must have eaten so much in that one week due to wedding stress that the wedding gown did not fit her and nobody could zip it up. We only had fifteen minutes to solve this problem; hence, we had to both think and act fast. There was no solution which came to our minds until my grandmother offered to find her a corset. Unfortunately, no one was wearing a corset in the 21st century and there was no place where we could just go and buy one.

While we were sitting desperately and my aunt was holding herself so hard not to cry, my mother's aunt stepped into the room with slow steps. Before she asked what was going on, I approached her and explained the situation. A miracle happened and she said she was wearing a corset. My aunt put her aunt's corset on and thank God, the wedding dress finally fit her.

The wedding started, and my mother was finally relieved. She was watching her sister`s happiness next to my father. Everyone was enjoying themselves, and most importantly, the bride and the groom were happy. While I was sitting, the groom's brother passed me by and whispered something to my mother, causing my mother to stand up abruptly like she had just told that she had been sitting on a firework and to beckon me in panic. When we were far enough from the music, she told me that the groom's brother, Poyraz, had lost the wedding rings, which was another drama. He said he had put the rings to the inside pocket of his jacket but left it in his groomsmen`s room and when he turned back there, he could not find his jacket where he had left it.

We came to the conclusion that likely, somebody mixed the jackets up and accidentally put Poyraz`s jacket on. If we had been able to get on the stage, take the microphone and ask the guests to check the inside pockets of their jackets, there would not have been a problem for us, but my aunt would have definitely gone nuts. Thus, all we could do was trying to find the black jacket among hundreds of other black jackets. I asked Poyraz if there was a distinctive quality of the jacket which might help us find it. After a long "Mmm..", he could finally say that he had red cufflinks in the shapes of sailing boats.

There was no time to waste, so we had to get to work. Poyraz was pretending to be walking while he was actually checking men's cufflinks. Likewise, my mother was welcoming guests and while shaking hands, she was checking guests` cufflinks. Yet, I had a different way of addressing this issue. I talked to two waitresses, explained the situation and asked them to check out guests' cufflinks while they were serving food and beverages.

Twenty minutes later, when my mother, Poyraz and I were just about to give up, one of the waitresses I had asked for help came by me and told me that he found the man with red cufflinks. We were walking to our target as if we had just turned back to a urban city from the Survivor competition. Our target turned out to be my uncle; because groomsmen shared the same room, my uncle and Poyraz had mixed jackets up and we did not think about a possibility that the person we were looking could be family. After I told my uncle how long we had been looking for that jacket, he started laughing and made all of us laugh at the situation we were in three minutes ago.



At the end of the night, despite all of the difficulties, the bride and the groom got married .Astoundingly, they were completely unaware of the fact that their wedding rings were lost the whole night and they would not be able to get married. We were going to tell Brother Ruzgar, my aunt`s husband, that my aunt was not able to fit into her wedding dress if her old aunt had not given her corset to Aunt Elif, but my aunt did not let us. Maybe, they do not know everything about their wedding night thanks to my mom and me, but one thing we all know is that they are great family with my baby cousin.