Cracking the Code

I’ve lost all confidence at making decisions—likely a result of too much concurrent home renovation and wedding planning. How many times can a person choose between white, cream, and ivory before going insane? I'll let you know once I get all tucked in a bed in the nearest psych ward.

Dr. Fiancé’s mom has very kindly offered to plan the rehearsal dinner for us—a particularly complicated endeavor given that we’re holding the dinner on an antique steam train as it ambles through the mountainside. She’s understandably antsy to get things finalized with a caterer, which requires Dr. Fiancé and I to agree on which caterer, what food, what drinks, whether we need appetizer plates, whether it’s fair to ask people to dress up if they’ll be eating dilly dip on a train, etc., etc., etc. I don’t want to keep my future mother-in-law hanging all day without some answers, which meant that I had to screw up my courage to call Dr. Fiancé in the emergency room—something I hate doing unless I’m mortally wounded. It just feels so lame to call an emergency room and have your fiancé paged so you can ask him how to get the automatic garage door open when the power’s out—not that I’ve ever stooped that low.

But my mother-in-law needs answers, so I screwed up my courage and dialed the number and was told by the friendly telephone operator that he would try to put me in touch with Dr. Fiancé “but he might be busy ‘with a code.’”

I’ve watched enough Grey’s Anatomy to know that a question about what caterer to go with doesn’t merit interrupting “a code.” Not that they would interrupt “a code,” but you know what I mean. Luckily when the operator transferred me, the phone just rang and rang and I could justify hanging up before I had to tell someone that while I knew my fiancé was dealing with “a code” I really needed to know whether he preferred the caterer that serves the mushroom caps or the one that makes spinach dip.

I don’t want to care how awful the bread is in our picnic-style rehearsal dinner sandwiches, but I do. And so does Dr. Fiancé. And so does his mom. And if you were eating one of the sandwiches, maybe you would, too.

I just wonder what the appropriate amount of time is to wait after a code before asking questions about hors d’oeuvres.