Happy Anniversary Baby!

It's hard to believe that my wife and I have been married for 17 years. What's even more frightening, is that we started dating 25 years ago. It doesn't seem possible.

Every once in a while my daughters will pull out our wedding video for laughs. They always comment on how much hair I had and how much younger we look. Watching this video brings me back to that day:

(imagine screen getting wavy for flashback sequence)

Being a man, I was more than happy to let my wife deal with all the minute details of our wedding. We had dated for eight years before we got married (I didn’t want to rush into anything!) so my wife had plenty of time to dream and plan for our pending nuptials. Sometimes she'd run her wedding plans by me but I was more of a sounding board. She really wasn’t seeking my opinion but rather bouncing her ideas off of me.

My only real wedding responsibilities were to:

1.) Show up. (Something she wasn’t sure I would do since I was a known commitment phobic!)
2.) Keep my mother happy by getting a Catholic Priest to co-officiate the ceremony.
3.) Pick out the wedding songs.

Tasks one and two were simple. Task three proved to be more of a challenge.

I thought of all the songs I’d heard at other people's weddings over the years: i.e. Paul Stookey’s “Wedding Song (There is Love),” The Carpenter’s “We’ve Only Just Begun” and Dan Fogelberg’s “Longer”. These were all great songs but it seemed they had been used ad nauseam. I wanted to be an original.

I have always been a big Dan Fogelberg fan and I had remembered a song on his Twin Sons of Different Mothers album. It was a cover of an old Judy Collin’s gem titled “Since You’ve Asked.” I loved the lyrics to this song and as far as I knew, no one had ever used it at their wedding. I played the song for my then fiance and she agreed that it would be perfect.

Jean, our wedding singer, sang this song just after we exchanged our vows:

Since You've Asked

What I'll give you
Since you've asked
Is all my time together
Take the rugged sunny days
The warm and rocky weather
Take the roads that I have walked along
Looking for tomorrow's time
Peace of mind --
As your life spills into mine
Changing with the seasons
Filling up the world with time
Changing time to reasons
I can show you all the songs
That I never sang to someone before.
We have seen a million stars
Lying by the water
You have climbed the hills with me
To the mountain shelter
Taking off the days
One by one
Setting them to breathe
In the sun.
Take the lilies and the Lace
From the days of childhood
All the willow winding paths
Leading up and outward
This is what I give
This is what I ask you for
Nothing more.

Who says I’m not a romantic?

My wife and I paid for the wedding ourselves, so we were on a tight budget. We couldn't afford a band so we hired a DJ from a company called Rent-a-DJ. Our DJ, they told me, would be Darren Murphy.

Murphy! I thought, that'll be great. He'll probably play tons of Irish music. I was a little surpised on the day of our wedding when we walked into the reception hall and discovered that Darren was actually African-American. I don't mean to disparage him but his playlist was a little heavy on the R&B/Motown side (at least for a crowd of Irish Catholics and New England Yankees.) This was especially true when Darren spun the Jackson 5 song, Mama I Found That Girl for my mother and I to dance to.

Mama, oh mama, I found that girl

Mama, oh mama, I found that girl

My new bride and I, chose the Stephen Bishop song It Might Be You for our first dance. We walked out to the dance floor as Darren spun the record:

Time...

I've been passing time watching trains go by

All of my life...

Lying on the sand, watching seabirds fly

Wishing there would be

Someone waiting home for me...

Something's telling me it might be you

It's telling me it might be you...

All of my life...

You might think it strange that I picked a song titled, It Might Be You, my wife however, thought that it captured my non-commital spirit.

Besides, the song ends on a more hopeful note:

I've been saving love songs and lullabies

And there's so much more

No one's ever heard before...

Something's telling me it might be you

Yeah, it's telling me it must be you

And I'm feeling it'll just be you

All of my life...

It's you..

It's you...

I've been waiting for all of my life...