Wednesday, October 21, 2009

25 YEARS OF WEDDED BLISS


John and I were married on November 3, 1984. We had planned the wedding for a very long time. I made my dress and the dress for my bridesmaid, Kathy. My other friend Carol made her own. The pattern for both my dress and theirs was actually the same. I made mine longer without the cowl and added the sash. Theirs was shorter with a cowl and sash. The mother of another friend of mine did my flowers as a wedding present. Lilies of the Valley and Violets. My favorites.
The ceremony was going to be at St. Vincent of DePaul church which was down the street from our house on Webster. We had the organist booked for November 4.
The reception would be at The Parthenon in Greek town. We chose that venue because not only was John friends with Johnny, who owned the restaurant, but we always left there happy and had never had an argument or disagreement there.
The invitations were out when John's back went out. He came home from work one day and said his back hurt. I told him to lay on the floor thinking that the firm surface would straighten things out. Three hours later, he couldn't get up! I called an ambulance and he went to the hospital. He was in the hospital for two weeks before the wedding. I don't know if it was just how they treated back pain in 1984, or Grant Hospital was just a crappy hospital, but their treatment plan was ' when you can walk to the bathroom by yourself, you can go home'. Some Tylenol 3, no physical therapy.
After about a week, he asked if there was something else that they could do, and they sent someone to put ice/heat on his back. Then they sent someone in to massage the area. One week later, he could walk to the bathroom and was released.
Meanwhile, I had to call everyone on the guest list to cancel the wedding. I had no idea when he would be released from the hospital, we had missed our pre-cana meetings and couldn't count on him getting well on time.
He was released on time, but everything was already cancelled.
We decided that we would get married at City Hall, but had to change the date from Sunday, November 4th to Saturday, November 3rd. City Hall isn't open on Sunday. To this day, I have to think twice about our anniversary!
We had no trouble changing the date with Johnny at The Parthenon, but we invited fewer people, just immediate family and our closest friends. I just didn't want to go into everything on the phone over and over again.
Because it was an afternoon wedding, we thought that we could have a party Saturday night for all our other friends and invited them by word of mouth. Nobody we knew could resist one of our parties. As it turned out, John's friend Paulie owned a bakery and made the wedding cake. He also catered the party for our wedding present.
As luck would have it, we had wonderful weather, got to drive around in a white '57 Bel Air,
had two great parties and just one sore back!
My sister took our photos in the Lincoln Park Conservatory and those all turned out beautifully.
And 25 years later...here we are!

IS IT NATURAL?


Isn't this a lovely color? Now that I'm used to it, I think so. I used to think that colors like this "just aren't natural". Evidently, I was mistaken.
Merriam-Webster defines natural as "
2 a : being in accordance with or determined by nature b : having or constituting a classification based on features existing in nature".
Well, maybe not 2a, but 2b, YES!

Fall has always been my favorite time of year and Sarah has always been my favorite daughter. Put the two together and you get very lovely colors.

Love ya bears!