This is my song, oh God of all the nations,

A song of peace for lands afar and mine.

This is my home, the country where my heart is;

Here are my hopes, my dreams, my sacred shrine.

But other hearts in other lands are beating,

With hopes and dreams as true and high as mine.

My country’s skies are bluer than the ocean,

And sunlight beams on cloverleaf and pine.

But other lands have sunlight too and clover,

And skies are everywhere as blue as mine.

Oh hear my song, oh God of all the nations,

A song of peace for their land and for mine.

May truth and freedom come to every nation;

may peace abound where strife has raged so long;

that each may seek to love and build together,

a world united, righting every wrong;

a world united in its love for freedom,

proclaiming peace together in one song.

Fourteen years ago today...

... I married my best friend.

Yes, I chose a burgundy velvet dress for my four bridesmaids. I still swear to this day that the dress could be worn again. You could *totally* wear it to a holiday party. My own dress was "candlelight ivory" as true white made me appear quite corpselike - not exactly the look one strives for on one's wedding day...


We opted to have birdseed thrown instead of rice as we left the church, because of the birds and their exploding stomachs and all. My family helpfully made up approximately one zillion little bags of birdseed, which were then most enthusiastically thrown at us - many people had multiple bags for ammo - as you can see in the above picture. I wound up using my bouquet as a shield as we made a dash for the limo. If you look carefully, you'll notice my father hurling birdseed from the church's doorway to ensure that we were bombarded from all directions. When I changed out of my dress, there was birdseed in my underthings and embedded in my skin as well, and still more came out in the shower the next morning from where it had become one with my bridal coif. (I felt a wee bit Sally Field-in-Steel Magnolias-ish with the amount of products the hair stylist used to create my bridal 'do - my hair was hard enough that one could knock upon it. I think that was more stuff in my hair on that one day than the entire rest of my life combined, which is saying something when you consider I'm from Jersey and I grew up in the 80s...) My siblings learned from our experience, and opted to have much safer "celebration" type things done for their respective wedding church-exits, like having tiny bells rung or bubbles blown. Thus, Hubby and I never had our revenge upon them for the pelting we endured.

Our first dance, to "A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square" as sung by Harry Connick, Jr. Great song but not really that danceable, as it turns out. It is "our" song though, one that Hubby used to play for me when he deejayed at the jazz station back when we were in college, despite it not being on the approved playlist.

Cutting the cake! We went with a chocolate cake with raspberry filling, quite delicious but rather a pain to frost with white icing. We also had plain, yellow cake with raspberry filling available for those attendees who didn't like chocolate. We didn't smash it either - we made a pact that we wouldn't, and we fed each other that momentous first bite simultaneously and with decorum to the strains of the Beatles' "When I'm 64" (you know: "will you still need me, will you still feed me, when I'm 64?").

Seeing as how we got married waaaay back in the early days of the interwebz and before digital photography and/or personal scanners were common, I didn't have any of our wedding photographs on my computer. I dug out our wedding album, which was redone for us by a friend who scrapbooks a few years back, and scanned the above pictures in from that. This is why some have borders or rounded edges or what-have-you, and also why they're not the greatest quality - I didn't want to try removing either the pictures from the album or the protective cover off the page, so I just slapped the album onto the scanner bed as best I could to scan them in. At least now I have some form of them on the computer!

We plan to celebrate not tonight, as Hubby is working late and it is the middle of the week and all, but rather this weekend, when we're going out to eat at Macaroni Grill, with Kiddo, who is fascinated by our wedding album now that she is old enough to sort of understand what a wedding is and also able to remember being a flower girl in her uncle's wedding back in 2007. She is a little upset that we didn't have her as our flower girl, so she's not quite getting the whole concept of "back before you were born" too well right now. At least she gets to go out to celebrate with us this weekend - she loved eating there for my birthday last month!

Anyhow... to get all mushy and sentimental for a moment (hey, it is my blog!), here is one of my favorite poems of all time. I wanted to have the first line - or at the very least, the first phrase - inscribed on the inside of our wedding bands, but both Hubby and the jeweler laughed their heads off at me. We settled for our initials and the date instead. As there are no such space limitations on my blog, I will share the poem in its entirety with you now:

i carry your heart with me(i carry it in
my heart)i am never without it(anywhere
i go you go,my dear; and whatever is done
by only me is your doing,my darling)
i fear
no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want
no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)
and it's you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows
higher than the soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)

~ e.e. cummings

Happy anniversary, honey! Thank you for putting up with me and my craziness for these past 14 years!