Wedding Memories

It's our 33rd anniversary today so I was thinking about some of my wedding memories. When I first moved to California, we were not married. I had done Calvin in 3 years and so was looking for a teaching job after those 3 years. In that round of looking, I tried to stay near Grand Rapids because of Randy. But I didn't find anything and ended up working for a year at Calvin's Registrar's Office. That was a good job, with very nice people but I thought I should try to be a teacher so I looked again in the Spring. This time I limited my possibilities to K, 1st or 2nd grade but I made myself NOT limit the location. And I ended up in San Jose Christian School, for 1st grade.

Randy drove me across the country to my new home, and helped me find an apartment quite close to the school. It was right near a busy street corner in San Jose, the corner of Leigh and Curtner, so I heard a lot of traffic through my window. But it worked fine for me. I remember when we drove in to San Jose at night, we must have been on the Sunol grade I think, and I saw all these lights of the huge city I was moving to all by myself. My stomach was kind of in a knot both of anticipation and fear.

When I made this big move I told Randy I figured it would make or break us and if he wanted to go out with other girls, I was okay with it but didn't want to know. It turned out that absence made the heart grow fonder and in October we decided to get married. We didn't want to wait so we got married during the Christmas break at Randy's church. My family lived in Syracuse, New York, at that time. They were still in the Air Force. I didn't know anyone in Syracuse. My mother wanted us to wait and get married in the summer in Lynden, which would have been nice, but we were too impatient.

So my then future mother-in-law, bless her, ended up doing all the work for planning my wedding. I kept it to just the family so it wouldn't be too much work for her. We got married in the Fireside Room of Randy's church. Dad did the ceremony and Charlie was best man, Jan was my maid of honor. Since it was only the two of them I told Jan just to buy a pretty dress she liked. Randy and Charlie rented tuxedos. I bought a dress at a wedding shop in San Jose. By the time we got married I had very little in my savings or checking account, but I did have the teaching job and Randy soon got a job at Memorex.

We had dinner together afterward at Bylsma's Pancake House, believe it or not, with chocolate wedding cake. Randy's Aunt Barb called the restaurant to make me come to the phone so she'd be the first to call me "Mrs. Moon," which was pretty sweet of her.

On the way back to San Jose we had car trouble. Are you surprised? The alternator broke. I had a pretty tan cloth winter coat with fur around the hood and cuffs and as soon as I got out of the car to look where exactly we were, a truck stopped to help us out. Back then I was pretty cute, if I do say so myself.

When we got back to San Jose, we first lived together in my little one-bedroom apartment, but not too long after we rented a small house from Mrs. Depew, the principal's mother-in-law, that many teachers ended up renting over the years. It was a cute little place with wood floors and we were very happy there.

We postponed a honeymoon until the summer, when we went backpacking in the Rockies, in some of the same spots Randy had backpacked with his friend Bill Schripsema over the years. When I look at those pictures I still can hardly believe it was me. It was a beautiful trip. One memory is one night we were sitting by the fire and Randy would throw small handfuls of wood chips to the fire. They'd burn as they fell, like a mini fire-fall, so pretty and romantic.