The wedding barn looks like a giant cake. (photo by Chris Erskine)

LAKE GENEVA, Wis. – Some dad was joking about the cost of raising a daughter the other day, putting the tab at between $700 billion and $1.6 trillion.

Obviously, no two daughters cost the same. Some are point guards, some are doctors, some are matzo-ball makers. I suspect that artists, including chefs, are the cheapest to raise. Except emotionally, of course.

“Art is the stored honey of the human soul,” Theodore Dreiser once noted. So are daughters – stored honey, gathered on “wings of misery and travail,” to finish Dreiser’s thought.

Sent another daughter off into the vast universe of adulthood the other evening. Not my daughter; actually my sister’s daughter. KD has a cover girl smile and a sailor’s elan. What a brilliant bride.

You know, we are born with our smirks, our quirks, our colossal unsightly feet. We’re pretty much what we are at birth, till we bring a spouse into our lives. Then we are what they are too.

Doesn’t that explain the human condition? Doesn’t it justify Shakespeare and John Milton and Etta James?

Indeed, we are guided by our restless hearts. And, starting about the sixth grade, we are obsessed with coupling up.

The guy KD chose for this occasion has a steel jaw and a sardonic outlook. Jeb is a Bears fan through and through, and prefers lake houses to vast oceans.

Obviously, he seems to check most of the boxes. Where does he stand on Craig Counsell’s handling of the Cubbie bullpen? We’ll get to that eventually, probably over cigars and icy double gins.

I remember when Jeb and KD were first dating. They came out to California for a camping tour, borrowing my tent, bags and stove. KD told me, “Uncle Chris, I really like this guy. Give me the good stuff.”

So I did.

The wedding was profound to me, as most weddings are. As I sit in the fourth row, I don’t ponder the wedding prep so much as all that leads up to it. How the bride’s parents met. How they established long-term credit, qualified for a house, managed to make the monthly payments, pay the OBGYN, raise six kids while covering braces and travel ball, keeping the kitchen somewhat clean, making a million meals, changing a billion beds.

All that led to this moment, this mitzvah, this dazzling movie-worthy bride.

I mean, this day doesn’t just happen.

Raising a son or a daughter means long nights and flu seasons and lost soccer socks. It’s two jiggers of agony, plus three jiggers of joy.

Hey kids, you think adulting sucks? Try parenting for a week.

One week!

Somehow, my sister Holly and her husband, John, raised six of them quite well, and we celebrate tonight at a barn outside Lake Geneva, the Lake Tahoe of the Middle West.

The wedding barn, embraced by corn fields, looks like a towering cake. Just look at the glorious way they lighted it.

Before the ceremony, the air hums a little, as always. My theory: It’s all the missing loved ones fluttering back to Earth to watch. But I have no evidence of this. Just a hypothesis crossed with a vibe.

My role is small. I’m just an uncle with an old Pedro Arrupe poem in his pocket, which I’ll read during the ceremony. It’s about love – a topic I don’t even pretend to understand.

“What you are in love with, what seizes your imagination, will affect everything. It will decide what will get you out of bed in the morning, what you do with your evenings, how you spend your weekends, what you read, whom you know…”

See, told you love was complicated.

I love the trappings – the passaround trays, the open bars, the champagne toasts. But what I really admire about weddings is what they say about family, love, fealty, compassion and our ceaseless belief in good outcomes. Weddings are giant funnel clouds of human faith.

I’m just glad to be here again, the last wedding of the season, to hear the father of the bride give his splendid toast and Christa her funny and moving maid-of-honor tribute.

Jeesh, why does this stuff still get to me so much? I think it’s because I’m missing my meds, lost in luggage on the way to Chicago. One moment, my carry-on is on the LAX shuttle, the next someone has swiped it, mistaking it for his own bag. Easy mistake.

Nothing much in it: wedding clothes, some meds, Suze’s jewelry, my comic books, all the stuff required for a jazzy weekend away.

But we plow through, don’t we? And look what happens when we do.

Need a bit of fellowship? Join me at the Rose Bowl Quarterbacks Club on Monday, Sept. 15, for a breakfast session on toughness, perseverance and college football talk. Special guest: Hall-of-Famer Ronnie Lott. To register, please Google Rose Bowl Quarterbacks Club.