HAPPY ANNIVERSARY BABY!

It was 3 years ago today that the unthinkable happened…………

She said YES!

Although it was quite an ordeal to get those words out of her mouth, I endeavored to persevere and was rewarded by a squeaky “yea, sure, OK if you can make it happen on July 12 I’ll do it”.

So let’s go back, let’s go back, let’s go way on way back when………… to July 12, 2007, the day the woman of my dreams said YES to this love-struck boy!

For those of you that may not recall the “story”, here is a brief recap.

I finally got her to agree to go marry me so I set it all up for a Las Vegas adventure, and then it began.

The adventure and everything else!

We left Hattiesburg in plenty of time to get to the airport in New Orleans and board our plane (because you don’t need to take any chances with stuff this important!). And as we were waiting in a very long line to check our luggage, we started to hear grumblings from Continental. Those grumblings soon turned to disgust and anguish as the truth of the situation was made evident………oh yea, “the flight had been cancelled”.

Then the fun we call “rebooking” began.

We finally waited in that long line long enough and we got booked on a new flight out the next morning at 6am.

This of course meant that we would have to be back at the airport at 4am.

This meant that we would have to get up at 3am.

This meant that we wouldn’t get much sleep for our big day!

But the 6am flight was going to get us to Vegas in plenty of time to do what we needed to do so I was still very happy!

So now all we have to do is go find us a hotel room for the evening in New Orleans…….

And without boring you with the gory details, just know that it took us visits to 5 hotels before we found one that had a vacancy – and it was right in the middle of crack central.

So we were entertained all night long.

And I mean that as sarcastically as I can mean it!

So after a non-restful night at the crack motel, we got to the airport the next morning at 4am and got all checked in. YEA FOR US!

We boarded the flight which then preceded to sit on the runway for an extra hour waiting on pilots………then we finally flew to Denver………..where we sat for a few more hours waiting on someone from Bumfuck, Egypt to come fix a mechanical problem with the plane.

Somehow, after all that, we finally got to Vegas about 2 hours before our wedding.

Please believe me that this is the short version of what happened. I have left out many other things, or as my wife was calling them at that time “messages from God”!

Because you see, my beautiful wife conditionally agreed to marry me contingent on any “signs from God” that she shouldn’t marry me…………

Getting the picture yet?

When we finally got to the amazing airport in Vegas, the limo I had booked wasn’t there because we had been rescheduled so many times and we were so late…..

“Hello, God, are you there”?

I eventually got the limo thing worked out and at this point, even my sunny disposition was taking a beating. I asked, no BEGGED the limo driver to hurry to the marriage bureau so we could get our marriage license………..so he took a “short cut” – which somehow caused him to slam on brakes and shoot our champagne bottle across the limo, crash off the glass and then spray all over us and the limo…..

“Why God, why”?

There was a very humorous story at the marriage bureau where an 85 year-old Jewish diamond merchant from New York was getting a license to marry a 25 year-old black hooker named “chastity” but I’ll leave that story for a cocktail party!

We got our license and then when we finally get to the hotel we had less than an hour before our “appointed time” on the roof of the Stratosphere for our ceremony.

And wouldn’t you know it, because we were so late, our room had been given away!

I had to sweet talk (bribe) a manager to hook us up………..so let’s just say that by this time, my wife was pretty much in tears and emotionally rinsed.

We get to our room and change quickly into our wedding attire and hurry up to meet with our preacher.

We finally felt like we were back on track and everything was going to be fine. So we took the elevator up to the roof of the tallest building west of the Mississippi River where I find out that my beautiful woman is more scared of heights than I am.

She really looked kind of green around the gills………

So we go out to the observation deck to do our thing and the preacher asks someone walking by if they wouldn’t mind being a witness to the ceremony. And the guy looks at us and says “NO” and keeps walking.

Well, I thought that was the last straw. She was about to jump off the damn building.

But we finally got someone to say “YES” and we did the deed and the rest, as we like to say, is history!

It’s fun to look back on that and remember how crazy it was. But mostly, for me, it’s fun to look back and realize that on this date in 2007, every dream I ever had came true for me.

I can’t state it strongly enough how important this was for me.

Our lives are marked by events and you judge yourself by those events. We end up dividing our lives as “stuff that happened before and after that event”. It is in that way that we realize the truly important things in our lives.

This was my moment of clarity. My time where everything I had ever gone through in life finally made sense to me. I could literally and figuratively see for miles and miles – even through space and time.

So thank you my darling. Thank you for everything you have done for me, everything you do for me and everything that will come in my life.

I owe you all.

And I give it gladly and take that responsibility on my broad shoulders and will never consider any of it to be a burden.

It’s simply who I am.

I love you so very much.

Happy Anniversary Baby!

Peace.