18 years ago today...

...I married datagoddess, my best friend. She still is. Happy Anniversary, sweetie!! I love you!!

Wedding Memories

As mentioned elsewhere, today is Toni’s and my 18^th anniversary.  I thought I’d jot down some of the more memorable events associated with our wedding.  It may be a bit random/disjointed, but sometimes that’s how my brain works.

Pretty sure it was the day before the wedding.  Toni and I were living in a tiny apartment in a not-so-great neighborhood on the east side of Indy, and we had very little living room furniture.  I asked Mark, my best man, to help me get a couch that Toni and I saw at Sam’s Club.  She was sure it was not at the closest store in Castleton, so Mark and I, in his brother’s less-than-comfortable truck, first went to the eastside store.  Nope.  So, we decided to check the other stores.  Ended up circumnavigating Indianapolis on I-465 hitting every Sams’s club in the city before ending up back in Castleton.  Sure enough, it was at that store.

I went to check out, and realized I didn’t have our Discover card (the only card other than ATM cards Sam’s accepted at the time).  By this time, I knew Toni would be home from work by the time we got back there, so I left a message on the answering machine, “Coming to get you.  They only take Discover.”

Picked up Toni, the three of us went back to Sam’s, we got the couch, got it loaded onto the truck, and headed back home.  Fortunately, the couch was still wrapped in plastic, because the heavens opened with a torrential rainstorm, although the outer cardboard box was quickly soaked to pulp.  Got to the apartment and it was still raining.  Picture the three of us, with help from a downstairs neighbor, trying to maneuver a couch up an exterior wrought iron spiral staircase onto a balcony and into our tiny apartment.  In the pouring rain.  This event has become forever stamped in my, Toni’s, and even Mark’s brains as The Couch Fiasco.  At least we no longer needed to have guests sit on lawn chairs in our living room.

Everything else was the next day.  Because of scheduling issues, we had the rehearsal luncheon, rehearsal, wedding, and reception all on a Friday.  We didn’t know any better.

Had the rehearsal lunch at the clubhouse of Toni’s parents’ condominium.  Basic lunch, big trays of Stouffer’s lasagna and accouterments.  The most memorable things about this part of the day were the fact that our friend Marie kept Toni from killing her mother, and our attendants’ gifts.  We gave them Super Soakers (along with more traditional things that I can’t even remember).  After lunch, the twelve of us (yes, the size of our wedding party got a little out of hand, but I’m glad for everyone who was in it) had a water gun fight outside the clubhouse.  I’ll never forget the look on the pastor’s face when we showed up at Trinity for the rehearsal dripping wet.

The wedding itself was fairly straightforward.  Although Toni and I were so ready for it to be over and it was so freaking hot because the AC in the church was out that we started down the aisle at the end and almost forgot to kiss.

We had the reception at the Murat Shrine in downtown Indy, in the Arabian Ballroom.  Got there to find that many of the food choices we had made earlier had been replaced with shrimp (ick).  Not that it mattered, because every time we tried to eat, we had to put down our food and do something, which meant the table got bussed.  We had my older brother, Dale, as DJ, and one of the nicest things he has ever done for me was at our reception.  Usually, when he does weddings, he embarrasses the bride and groom with various antics such as dancing with hula hoops, a contest of unrolling toilet paper, etc.  He made my friends among the wedding party do more of these things, and pretty much left us alone.  One of the cutest parts of the evening was watching my niece, age 1 ½ at the time, dancing along with us.  She would swing her hips and arms, look behind her to see what others were doing, and continue on.

I recall taking a rather circuitous route to our hotel for the night to ensure we weren’t followed, because we had received threats thereof.  It was close to midnight and we were exhausted, and Toni desperately needed to get out of that dress so she could finally take a deep breath.

There’s one last memory I’ll share here:  Burnt microwave popcorn and Diet Coke.  And I’ll leave it at that. 

Not everything went the way we wanted it on that day, and looking back there are a lot of things we might have done differently regarding the actual ceremony and related proceedings, but one thing Toni and I have shared since is that the wedding was not the important part.  The marriage is.

Originally published at Abnormality Locality. You can comment here or there.