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| Our wedding day May 1987 |
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| Family photo taken with the extended Bingham Clan
After posting a Facebook entry celebrating another year of our marriage with a wedding day photo juxtaposed with a current photo of us, I realized that other than telling our children the long, twisted story of our engagement and wedding day, and once or twice forcing it down friends ears, no one knows the story of how we ended up together.
I tried to put our full story into the book, Ezra and Hadassah: A Portrait of American Royalty, but I was dissatisfied with every attempt. Our story was so long and convoluted it was like one of those kitschy Russian nesting dolls, where opening one wooden doll just leads to another, to another and another and soon the whole story turned into another book far off course from the starting point. I decided to be brutal and cut us to the bare minimum, knowing full well we would need our own 250 pages bound in a separate cover and titled something like "Holy Cow, How Did This Ever Work Out?"
My plan is to make my next book the story of us and our family so we can finally agree on an official version of our romance, courtship and the day we became legally entangled together. I know we have some long-standing quibbles about how things went down between us, and I respect your right to a version that makes you seem better than you actually were. I also admit the possibility that my account portrays me as a long-suffering, patient girlfriend and fiancé of a conflicted man for much longer than we both know is within my physical capabilities.
Here are the facts that I think we both agree on:
1. You met me for the first time at a church dance, less than two weeks after you returned home from spending 18 months in the jungles of Mexico preaching the gospel to natives who had no problem with chickens and pigs running in and out of their mud plastered homes.
2. You took a vow with your buddies to not get married for a good long while. Basically, you formed a Woman-Hater's Club. As we all know from watching The Little Rascal's on tv, that meant you were doomed to fall in love. I was Darla, the girl you found irresistible and you were my Alfalfa, the boy who wasn't sure how to have both romance and the freedom of boyhood at the same time.
3. You proposed marriage during church, while we were singing the opening hymn, "Hark, the Herald Angels Sing." You hate that you did that.
4. During our six month engagement, you broke off our engagement three times. You kept saying, "I love you, but I don't know how I am going to manage school and marriage." Apparently, you knew intuitively I was going to be a full-time project.
5. Your mother is the reason we got married. She told you to quit jerking me around and either marry me or pay my way back into school so I could get on with my life. You did the math and figured out it would be cheaper to marry me.
6. We had a huge fight the night before our wedding, ending with me saying, "Fine. If you don't like it, don't marry me." I have always had a flair for the dramatic.
7. You were an hour and 1/2 late for our wedding. I knew you took my final words the night before to heart and you weren't coming.
8. When you did show up, I could have kissed you and killed you at the same time.
9. When our wedding guests were separated in the temple and no one knew where everyone was in the building, the frustrated temple matrons almost forced us to get married without witnesses because we royally screwed up the schedule on the busiest wedding day of the year at the temple.
10. I got the world's longest, messiest bloody nose ever, seconds before we were supposed to get married.
11. I fell asleep from sheer exhaustion at the luncheon after our morning wedding. I think Stephanie has a photo of me passed out in a chair with my mouth hanging open, a sandwich dangling in mid-air from my clutched fist.
12. The air conditioning was broken at our evening reception at the church. It was over 90 degrees inside the building and everyone sweated to death. The icing melted off our wedding cake, thankfully after the pictures were taken.
13. Your friends put pebbles inside the hubcaps of your car and we spent our honeymoon listening to a horrible racket every time you drove under 40 miles an hour. It sounded like the engine was going to fall out.
14. The day we got married, we had $300 in our pockets, no jobs and one months worth of rent paid on a studio apartment.
15. We made it. Not just survived it, but in a stellar, both feet dug in the dirt, screaming wildly as we slide into home plate, we made it all the way.
I think that about sums up the outline of the next book. What do you think- do we have a best seller or what?
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