Seriously.
Not exactly what I expected when I woke up
this morning. J Amy & Terry Wagner (now that they’re
married) have been investigating the Church for several months. Today was the day they set to get married by
Bishop Allen. Elder Porter and Elder
Jennings dropped off a wedding invitation to us on Thursday; it told us the
wedding would take place under the pavilion of a nearby park at 10:00 o’clock
this morning and our whole family was invited.
We arrived at the park at about
9:45 a.m. The first thing that became
very clear was the park was quite crowded (understatement, really—it was
packed!). Trying to find a parking place
was next to impossible. In desperation,
I dropped everyone off in front of the park and spent another five minutes
berthing my metal beast. As I walked
toward the pavilion, I realized that the reason for the crowded conditions had
to do with little league baseball. Today
was “opening day” for the little league, it appeared, and there were families
and baseball players and balloons and … everything everywhere! With all the noise and confusion and mass of
humanity, trying to conduct a wedding ceremony in the pavilion seemed to be
somewhat problematical. It was, however,
our second situation that was even more of an issue.
What I learned was that when
the phone call was made at the beginning of the week to find out if the
pavilion was available, the person at the city asked how many people would be
attending the wedding. After learning
the number of people was under 40, the person said that no reservation was
needed for a group that small. Unfortunately,
because no reservation was made based on the information offered, someone else
with a group larger than 40 came along and reserved the pavilion for the entire
day. Even though 4 of the 10 or so tables
were decorated at the time and only a family of 4 from this party was present
at that moment, the family was in no mood to share with our group (the wife
asked us several times when we were planning to leave and reminded us about the
same number of times that she had reserved the area).
Now we’re stuck with the
dilemma of what to do. The bride had not
arrived. Because of the situation, she
was told to wait while things were figured out was figured out. Our church building was not available due to
a scout activity. The status of the
other closest church building could not be determined because the building
coordinator wasn’t available. Bishop said
the wedding could be in his back yard, but we’d have to leave quickly
thereafter because an inspector was coming later that morning (he and his
family will be moving in a few weeks L). Suddenly Jennifer turned to me and said,
“What about our backyard?”
A few years ago, we had been
fortunate to be in a position to fix up our back yard from the mess it had
become (now with the drought and the increase in water prices our front yard is
in the same situation). I approached
bishop and said, “Our front yard is mess, but we could hold the wedding in our
back yard.” And so it was that our back
yard became the new venue for the wedding.
Since we hadn’t been expecting to host a wedding, we had to race back to
our house to do some quick tidying. I
finally had an excuse to pull the few weeds that had popped up out of the rocks
(I got an assist from bishop and a couple other attendees J). Jennifer had some red crape paper that had
been in our “junk” drawer for years, so she placed it in couple of strategic
places outside. After pulling all the
chairs we could find in the house and putting them on the patio, the wedding
went forward.
The ceremony started about 30
to 45 minutes later then was planned, but everything worked out in the
end. Amy and Terry were married. Pictures were taken of them and of all those
who were in attendance. We had a little
reception for them in the dining room.
And after most everyone had returned home, I got some help cleaning up
from an unexpected source. J Jennifer was very excited about the
opportunity to serve in such a manner.
She told me that she had always wanted to host a wedding in our
house. I don’t remember her saying
anything of the sort, but that isn’t to say that she never did, I just don’t
recall the conversation. I’m just glad
we were able to pitch in to make a day that was going badly into one that
turned out happy for everyone. J
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