How I Didn't Meet My Husband

This account of my future husband's marriage proposal includes a prelude along with the proposal and also the wedding, because of the way it all came about. You could say the proposal book-ends the wedding.

When people ask me how I met my husband I tell them that we didn't. They give me this look that either says "Did I miss something?" or "You've definitely flipped your lid."

It was 1979 and my foster parents needed to go to Hawaii to encourage fellow pastors, since they'd taken a church in the midst of a split and were very discouraged. I went with them.

Now, I need to take a pause in this narrative to inform you that my foster mother was an avid matchmaker.

We were still over the ocean on the way to Hawaii. Please understand we weren't there yet. She turned to me and told me that the reason I was going with them was because I would be meeting my future husband. I decided at that point to avoid any hints of any kind of involvement with the opposite sex, while in Hawaii, period.

The next morning I was the first one of our group to be up. The pastor's wife came into the room I was in and after greeting me, told me that they had the perfect man in their church for me, though he was in Oregon at the time helping his family. All I could think was, "Good grief! We've not even been here 24 hours and those two have already gotten together and plan to marry me off to this man sight-unseen." I was so glad that he wasn't there for the entire two weeks we were there.

I was relieved to escape. Ha Ha, That was not the end of it, by far. They didn't allow distance to stand in the way of their understanding of true romance. They each worked on both of us until we decided to write to each other, just to get them out of our hair.

The first letter we each received from the other, we knew that this was the person that we'd be spending the rest of our lives with. We received the letters in late January. We wrote to each other, talked on the phone and sent gifts to each other.

We wrote a Lot of letters back and forth, about ourselves, about our everyday activities, what we thought and our plans for the future. We also drew pictures of thoughts and incidents. My husband would write his letters and seal them. Then the really important thoughts he was working up to, he would splash all over the outside of the envelopes in brightly colored sketches and clearly understood thoughts.

I was living in a ministry, in a very small community, where almost everyone knew each other. Since my future husband's most important thoughts and intentions were on the outside of the envelopes you could easily count how many didn't know what was going on. Everyone had something to say about it, including the postmaster.

My future husband proposed to me in a letter. My answer was still on it's way to him when he decided to come meet me in April with the full intention of proposing to me a second time and marrying me, since I wouldn't give him a straight answer over the phone. He brought a selection of rings for me to choose from. Everyone else was insisting that we were getting married. I kept insisting that we were meeting, getting to know each other more and getting engaged. Weell...

Everyone was right. He arrived April 11, we stayed up all night talking, he got down on his knees and proposed to me, a second time, as the sun was rising. I accepted and we were married April 26. He wanted to marry in one week. I wanted to marry in October. We, uh, compromised. He stayed in an upstairs bedroom while I was in my downstairs bedroom as we prepared for our wedding.

We had two weeks to prepare for the wedding. Everything that I'd put on my wedding "want" list, over a year earlier came true: He brought the exact wedding rings that I'd wanted. My foster mother had already found the wedding dress pattern I'd wanted, in a yard sale. My foster siblings sang at our wedding with what they had thought was a substitute when in fact it was the precise song I'd wanted to walk down the aisle on. All of my biological family showed up for the wedding and my father gave me away. My foster father married us and with just three hand written invitations we had over 60 people at the wedding.

Other wonderful things that happened for and about the wedding were: Back then all engaged couples were required to have a medical examination before they could even get their marriage licenses. The waiting time for the examines were running two weeks. But the woman we talked to at the hospital was able to convince a local
doctor to take us the next day. The wait for the appointment for the wedding licenses was also running two weeks. But we were given ours appointment in two days.

The woman who made our cake usually only used cake mixes and traditional types of decorations. I was told to pretend that I didn't know that and tell her what I wanted in a cake and how I wanted it decorated, since it was a custom deal, I got it. I got a flower shaped cake in three tiers which was a walnut cake sweetened with brown sugar, flavored with nutmeg, with a tart lemon filling and cinnamon flavored whipped cream frosting and decorated with fresh flowers.

The Associate Pastor's wife sewed my attendant's outfits and that of the flower girl. She loaned me her second sewing machine, so I could make my own dress. Our church did a potluck fruit salad reception for the wedding. The photos for the wedding were done by two different people as their wedding gifts to us and everything we spent on the wedding and honeymoon was reimbursed at the reception.

We had to have the rehearsal right before the wedding, which we thought might end up being late since my father and family hadn't arrived yet. They did, just before the wedding was to begin, in time for one run-through. The wedding, which was in the backyard, looked like we'd been preparing for months and had done several rehearsals.

The only hitch to the day was that it was the first day of fishing, which my foster father had not, previously, told me even though he was an avid fisherman. We had the wedding at mid morning so that he wouldn't miss the entire day. However, he mislaid the marriage license and certificate and we were still searching for it long after everyone had left the reception, in the mid afternoon.

After a two week honeymoon in the San Francisco Bay Area and an overnight stay in Honolulu, we arrived back home in Kailua-Kona, the same week that my affirmative answer to his proposal arrived in the mail. It took over a month to reach its destination.

We're still married and that was 1980.