7th anniversary

Carol and I picked our wedding day seven years ago, in part because it was about halfway between my birthday in March and her birthday in July. (I for one never thought about it nearly coinciding with Mother's Day.) Having been married before, the planning of the event didn't hold much excitement for me. I mean, I wanted to BE married; it's just, at some level. I just rather have eloped. But Carol hadn't been married, and I didn't want to cheat her out of "her day".

Most fortunately, my father was, among many of his other skills, an amazingly good designer of weddings and other celebrations. So when Carol and I went down to Charlotte in April 1999, Carol and Dad dealt with color schemes - PLEASE don't ask me what the color scheme of the wedding was - and decorations for the reception, while I concentrated on what I wanted in the service itself: the Scripture, the music, etc., with Carol's input.

The wedding was a careful negotiation: one of my new brothers-in-law, John, as one of my groomsmen (hmm - his birthday was yesterday, but he died a couple years back) and I got to use my then eight-year-old niece Alex as the flower girl. Stuff like that.

The event turned out to be bigger than either of us had originally thought, and as I mentioned last year, at a church we longer attend, but all of that is temporal.

Baseball figures into our anniversary this year. I'm going to the Hall of Fame game in Cooperstown between Cincinnati and Pittsburgh...with my father-in-law. Then he, his wife, and my wife will rendezvous somewhere. She's been a good sport about this.

Happy anniversary, honey. (Geez, I don't know why I wrote that'; she STILL doesn't read the blog.)