The tsunami hit Indonesia and Sri Lanka the hardest, but the worst-affected part of the mainland was coastal southern India, where my father's family lives. So I called him up right away and asked if everyone was okay. He said they were, as was a coconut grove he owns (news to me) whose trees are apparently up on cliffs and thus survived.

Then he asked what I thought about the idea of him getting remarried.

"To Tina?" I asked. Tina was a medical student he'd dated for a few years. I think she eventually became an ophthalmologist. But apparently I was way out of date — they hadn't been together for close to a decade. This was someone new, someone I'd never met and had never heard of. And that was all the information I got during that call. Oh, wait, there was one more thing. "She's... about your age," he said.

Now, I'm 30. In less than a week I'll be 31. It might be reasonable to say that anyone in her thirties is "about my age." So I thought, maybe she's 39. Having a 39-year-old stepmother would be strange but not necessarily from Bizarro World.

But nuh-uh. I just got back from the wedding.

My dad's 61.

My stepmother is TWENTY-EIGHT.

Let's enjoy that again. My stepmother... is the same age as my baby sister.

When my dad said that he was getting remarried I thought he meant at some unspecified point in the distant future. Once again, wrong. One month after the call, Jen and I flew out to Los Angeles for the wedding. The trip got off on a good note because we took Jetblue, and while air travel is never exactly fun, both our flights were much more pleasant than my recent trips on so-called "legacy carriers" like American and United. They were also much cheaper, at $85 for what Mapquest tells me is the 3002 miles between Boston and Long Beach.

This was my first time going to southern California without spending any time in Orange County. I'd been about to book us a hotel room in Anaheim when I realized, wait a minute, the wedding's in Culver City — why not stay nearby? So it was Los Angeles County the whole weekend, which was interesting. I don't really know LA County at all. Still, it felt like home. The air felt right. The trees looked right; it was the last weekend in January — springtime — and the hills were a fresh, vivid green. The roads were the proper width and intersected at right angles. KROQ was right where it should be at 106.7 FM. I'd thought that as an OC product I'd be just as much a tourist in LA as Jen. But nah. (Hmm. Does this mean that "Los Angeles Angels of Anaheim" isn't quite as retarded a name as I first thought? Must ponder this.)

I got us a reservation at a well-reviewed hotel in Bel Air. For whatever reason we were upgraded to the Junior Executive Suite. This included a giant bed into which four people could have fit comfortably, eight if you put some of them on top of the others. And if the rumors about junior executives in Los Angeles are true, it had undoubtedly been used many times for precisely this purpose. The suite also proved my point from last time about inappropriate phones. I guess junior executives are pretty uncouth.

The wedding was held Friday afternoon around a small oblong table in the conference room of the King Fahad Mosque in Culver City. In attendance were me, Jen, my brothers Raihan and Rabie, and my dad's assistant Nicole, who pretty much runs his entire life and made all the wedding arrangements from buying the cake to booking the dinner afterwards. (My dad's cousin Nazreen was supposed to attend, I learned later, but they'd forgotten about her and she didn't have transportation of her own.) Then there was the imam, a fellow from Ghana who'd just come back from the haj; my dad; and his bride, who turned out to be named— well, there used to be an amusing anecdote here, but since she has forbidden me to use her name, you will have to soldier on without it. Just pretend there was a funny moment here and give a light chuckle.

Also, since I can't use her name, I will henceforth refer to her as Child Bride.

So the imam asked who was going to give Child Bride's hand away and this question was met with an awkward silence. "Ah, yes, I remember," the imam said, "your family is in Syria."

"Austria," Child Bride said. (As the song goes, "You say po-tay-to / I say po-tah-to / You say Vienna / I say Damascus...")

After a few more preliminaries the imam read some verses from the Qur'an and then launched into a sermon about the importance of marriage. Allah could have created a world without it, he said. After all, he had created Adam simply by declaring, "Be," and Adam was. He could have created the rest of humanity the same way. But instead he created Hawa (Arabic for Eve) and consequently life would perpetuate itself through marriage. From marriage springs life and hence all things. "I have another story," he went on, glancing down at the Qur'an on the table before him. "Many years ago, a young man and a young woman had a child. That child's name was— Edison."

I didn't recall having run into this sura before. I perked up. "Was Edison a Muslim?" the imam continued. "No. But without marriage, there would have been no Edison. And what did Edison invent?" Pause. "Edison invented, uh..." Longer pause. It suddenly became clear that the imam had forgotten who Edison was. "Light bulb," Rabie volunteered.

"Yes, that's right," the imam said, chuckling with relief. "And the light bulb spread throughout the world. All of the great inventions come from great people and for that we have marriage to thank. What would the world be like," he solemnly intoned, "if there was no Bill Gates?"

(I swear I am not making this up.)

His next topic was about taking one another for granted. "Behave so that she thinks you are the best man in the entire Los Angeles," he said. "And you behave so that he thinks you are the best woman in the entire Los Angeles. Of course, no one is perfect. Maybe you are 80% good, 20% not so good." For some reason he scribbled these figures onto a notepad no one but me could see. "The 20% is the price you pay for the 80%."

"Let me use a sports comparison," the imam went on. "In marriage, you have to be a team. If you want to win, you have to play as a team, not as individuals. What language do you speak at home?" Pause. Just in case this questioned turned out not to be rhetorical either, Child Bride replied, "English." The imam nodded. "Yes, but there is also body language," he said. "When you work as a team, you know how to work together without speaking. It is like in basketball, when the point guard throws a perfect pass without looking. How? Because he knew his team and knew where his teammate would be. That is how a marriage should be."

Eventually he wrapped up and sent around the papers to be signed. When they came back to him he reached into his pocket and produced a special pen for signing sacred documents of this sort. It had some writing on it — probably a Qur'anic verse, I figured. When his hand came near me I peered at the pen. It said: "ATTRACT MORE CUSTOMERS WITH YOUR IMPRINT HERE!"

"So, are any of you married?" the imam asked when the ceremony was over. He looked down the table at my brothers. "How about you? No?"

"We're like point guards who don't quite have the fundamentals," one of my brothers replied.

On the way out the imam gave my dad and Child Bride a copy of a pamphlet about married life. They gave it to Rabie. It had a section about the importance of folic acid. It also had a section about domestic violence, which featured a graph with the following boxes: "1. TENSION"; "2. ABUSE"; "3. CALM". "Hey, at least it ends well!" Rabie said brightly.

After the ceremony we reconvened at the Beverly Hills Hotel for dinner. (This turned out to be the one restaurant meal we had the whole weekend that wasn't spectacular.) There I sat next to Child Bride and learned at least a little bit of the story of how we came to be related, which apparently I am not allowed to talk about either.

I asked whether the house was still in the same state of disrepair it was in the last time I was there — concrete floor in what used to be the family room, no banister on the stairs, etc. Nicole asked how long it'd been like that. I knew it'd been close to a decade, but Rabie, who's never lived anywhere else, had the date: "1995," he said.

Child Bride turned to my dad. "I thought you told me that was temporary!" she said.

"Yeah, he told you a lot of things," Rabie said.

People keep asking me how I feel about all this. A lot of them seem to assume that I will be distraught or at least feel like my life has been turned upside-down or whatever. But the fact is that my relationship with my family is quite distant. This trip marked the first time I'd seen my brothers or my mother in three years, for instance. Very little of my sense of identity is based on blood relations — so little that I don't even have the same last name as the rest of them. So I'm not traumatized in the least. Actually, I've found the whole story hilarious. I thought some of the family structures I'd built into the book I'm working on might be over the top, but hell with that — this is real life and I'm two and a half years older than my stepmother. It is wonderfully surreal. So that plus the thrill of being in California again (especially when the alternative was another weekend of Massachusetts winter) meant I was in a pretty giddy mood the whole time. My brothers were muttering running jokes all afternoon — they especially loved the imam's repeated basketball references. At one point I asked Nicole what had happened with Nazreen and from behind me I heard: "She's in the huddle with Larry Brown." "Gotta play the right way." It is a good thing I wasn't consuming a beverage right then. (*)

And my new mom seems like a nice kid. So what's to be upset about?

I guess this would be the time for some pictures. On Saturday, Jennifer and I went to the Getty Center, which is widely considered Los Angeles's premier (or, as the LA-bashers would say, only) cultural attraction, a hillside complex with a garden and a museum; I got a couple of nifty shots there, which are over at the Pictures page. But I also have some pictures which have little photographic merit but which help to illustrate this story, so I put them on a page of their own, which I have since been forced to take down. So, uh, bye, I guess.

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