Remembering

Our twentieth anniversary got me thinking about our wedding day. And our first fight. On the altar.

It was a balmy ninety five degrees outdoors and about one hundred and ten indoors. That's right...no air conditioning in the church.

Seven bridesmaids, eight priests, four musicians, three hundred guests (and a partridge in a pear tree). We even had a printed program so everyone could tell the players apart, keep track of the ceremony, and, more importantly, use it as a fan!

This was not some simple, "Do you? I do. Do you? I do too." event. Oh, no. This was a spectacle.

After a seven minute entrance procession down the aisle (my mother actually timed it, probably so that she could tell the coroner exactly what time it was when the trumpet player dropped dead from heat exhaustion..."he was only eight bars from the end!"), the ceremony began.

Over an hour later, after everyone had dissolved into little puddles of sweat, it was time to present a small bouquet of flowers to the Blessed Mother, whose statue was off to the right of the altar.

"Stay over there until the song ends," the priest instructed us. "Then come back for the final blessing." Little did he know, but this was like the referee telling the fighters to go to their corners and come out fighting when the bell rings.

We had barely gotten over to the statue when Tim said,"Okay, let's go." (The fact that he was wearing a wool blend tux in a sauna might have been making him a little irritable, and the thought of escaping to an air-conditioned car prompted him to act rashly and poke the tiger).

Naturally, I refused (I may have been a bit cranky myself, but hey, that's a bride's perogative. Why did he not see that it was all about me?)

As the song progressed (I still don't know where they came up with the extra seventy-two verses of the relatively short song I had chosen), so did the argument.

The more Tim insisted that we leave, the more I insisted that we stay, the more verses the musicians added.

Meanwhile, everyone who was still conscious in the church thought that we had some kind of weird fanatical devotion to Mary and we were intent upon reciting the entire rosary.

Of course, this entire conversation was conducted in hissed whispers out of the sides of our mouths (now after twenty years, we just yell) with fake toothpaste commercial smiles plastered on our faces.

Eventually, we did go back, get that final blessing and climbed gratefully into our air-conditioned car, the whole unfortunate incident forgotten (okay, not really forgotten). We even managed to make it through the entire reception without going a second round (It's amazing what a thirty degree drop in temperature can do!). After all, we had to save something for the honeymoon!