…on July 3, 1973, I was a kid in my twenties about to get married for the second time, and boy was I nervous. Just about everything went wrong that day.
- Because we “eloped” with just 4 grad student pals as our witnesses, our families assumed a baby was coming. In fact, we were just too impatient with all the postponements due to “Aunt Agatha can’t come June 7, how about the next weekend–no, Uncle Ed can’t make the next weekend…” Well, a baby did come, about 15 months later.
- I baked us a chocolate wedding cake from a mix, but assumed I wouldn’t have to grease and flour my brand-new miracle cake pans lined with Teflon. Wrong! Our guests ate bowls of ice cream with huge hunks of scraped-from-the-pan cake on top.
- We got lost driving to Dutch Neck traffic court, so we missed the time of appointment with the judge. We and our pals had to sit through an hour of testimony about stop-sign violations and DUI before being called into the back room for our “ceremony.”
One thing went right–I married a wonderful man, who hasn’t once stopped surprising me in all the 30 years afterward.
Feel free to throw rice anytime.
7 responses so far ↓
1 Ken Camp // Jul 3, 2003 at 12:29 pm
I didn’t elope, but about 10 months before your “ceremony” we did ours at a cost of $35 in my aunt’s backyard. 30+ years later things all still work like they’re supposed to! Congrats Betsy!
2 Frank Paynter // Jul 3, 2003 at 1:01 pm
What a wonderful wedding! Happy anniversary to you both. Congratulations to the groom and my best wishes to the bride — thirty years late…
3 Halley // Jul 3, 2003 at 1:18 pm
Love this … congrats!
4 jeneane // Jul 3, 2003 at 6:09 pm
YAHOOOO!!!!congrats Betsy. That is a wonderful story and a sweet tale of real love.
5 The Children's Liberation Front (actually, Yule) // Jul 3, 2003 at 6:31 pm
Happy happy anniversary, Betsy! Here’s Margaret Visser, from Much Depends on Dinner, on rice: Everywhere rice is a symbol of fecundity. (…) A great length of time and many happy events are imagined by the guests throwing rice, in addition to fertility. Fortune (in this case good fortune) has always, in the west, been pictured as bouncing particles, random and plentiful. (p.169) What a fortunate “coincidence” that you married a physicist: may your particles continue to bounce forever!
6 Betsy Devine // Jul 4, 2003 at 4:39 pm
Aw shucks guys, thanks! BTW read Halley’s much sexier bit about true love, her latest Alpha Male piece and one of my favorites.
7 Ilbrutto55 // Apr 26, 2007 at 9:55 am
This is an lovely piece of writing of the highest degree of asymptotic freedom. I love it.